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Untitled & Unfinished
I always dreamed this day would never happen. If it did happen, I thought that I would be long gone before it did. The funeral was nice. It captured her in a beautiful way. The way she was pictured though, was not the way I looked at my baby sister.
She was the quiet type. She never went out with her friends or went to the mall with me. Hours of her time was spent in her room, scribbling poetry, stories, and quotes into millions of spiral notebooks. I always thought she was weird, but now she was just a normal person. She was my everything, now my everything is gone.
Our house was quiet. Mom had retreated to her bedroom to cry once again and dad went outside to occupy his mind. I didn’t know what to do now. I walked to my room, passing my sisters room. I stopped in the doorway of her bedroom and scanned the room. It had everything in place, like she always kept it. Her clothes hung neatly in her closet, her bed made with all the pillows in place. The only thing out of order was a spiral notebook, lying open on her desk. I tiptoed to her desk and stood tracing my fingertips on the edges of the page. The lines were filled with her big, blocky writing that I always loved. The top line was filled with three words: ‘Untitled and Unfinished’. I didn’t know if reading this would be invading her space but I couldn’t resist what was untitled and unfinished.
It was a poem, written in stanzas. “You look at me and see a girl that doesn’t want to stand up for herself.” The first line said. “But inside I want to explode my thoughts like a spewing volcano. I can’t let pain in my life. People try to put it in me though, and sometimes they succeed.” The stanza ended. The outcome of this poem scared me, though I continued. “If you put a pen in my hand, I will go mad with the storm of words
whirling on the page. People say that I won’t excel to anything. That I’ll just be one person on Earth. I wonder what they’ll think when I’m in the limelight.” It was unreal how she captured herself. It was just how I pictured her. Everything that was written so far was exact. I continued, “You think I’m just a normal girl. But do you really feel what I feel? Like every night I have to take numerous pills just to make me feel better in the morning? Or did you know that I have been stuck by more than a million needles in my life? You think I’m a normal girl? Then you must be stupid.”
The tears were welling in my eyes. My hands were shaking and I was regretting reading this. There was one more stanza. “I don’t know how the world works. I don’t know why the grass is green or why the sky is blue. But the one thing that I know for a fact is that my life is untitled and unfinished…” Tears were really coming now. My makeup was running down my cheeks and black drops were landing on my shirt. The date was just weeks before she passed. She thought her life was going to keep continuing. We all thought the same thing. I don’t know what happened next. The world was spinning around me. I wanted her to be beside me, her hairless head lying on my shoulder. She always said she was ugly. She was beautiful. Did I tell her that? Did I tell her she was amazing? Did I ever tell her she was the best? Did I tell her I loved her?
Tears falling, I reread the poem again. Untitled and unfinished, it bounced off the page every time I read it. Untitled and unfinished, untitled and unfinished. I wiped my eyes and grabbed her notebook off the desk. I ran into my room and locked the door. I sat in the floor, the notebook open to that one page. I didn’t want to turn the page but I
couldn’t stop. Why did I not know that my sister had so much bottled up inside? The pages in the notebook after that were blank. This was the last thing she wrote. I went back to the haunting poem and flipped the pages before it. Blank, nothing but lines. I went back and forth, wondering and hoping that words would suddenly appear. I was crying. I shut the note book, looking at the yellow cover. That’s when I saw it. In her writing was a small paragraph, addressed to me. “Megan, I filled these pages with the most personal poems I have ever written. I know you think they’re weird, but if you just read them over and over until they are embedded into your head, you will get them and hopefully understand me. Will you read them sis?” I kept crying, trying not to drop a tear on the yellow notebook. “Yes,” I said answering her final question. “Yes,” I wiped my eyes, drying them the best I could. I got up and clutched the notebook to my chest. I walked back into her room, opened the notebook to her last writing piece, and sat it on the desk, just like I found it. I walked to her closet and rummaged in it, smelling her perfume and shampoo that still lingered around.
When I was finished in her room, I shut the door. I left her room just like it was, and always will be. I never imagined this day would come. Theoretically she was gone, but to me, she was as alive as ever. This day was supposed to be full of sorrow, though I found myself smiling. The day my sister, showed her true colors to me. They were beautiful, thinking back. The colors that made up her. If someone saw her, they probably saw torture black and bore gray, and I would've thought the same thing. Now, though, my sister was yellow with laughter, pink with cheer, and blue with calmness. I would never want to take those away from her. Those are just a few of the things that make up her though. Though her life is unfinished and nobody really put a title on her lifetime, her
poem is and always will be true.
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