Easter

I love Easter. Usually I at least notice it coming, but not this year. This year I just remembered yesterday.
What is the rule for when Easter is again? The second Sunday at some point?
Anyway, sadly now there are no egg-dying frenzies, no cute decorations put up at school, no waking up at 6 a.m. to see if I got the Easter bunny's signature. My parents still got me a small Easter basket though full of sugar-free candy. It made me happy. I realized today that I only have one more Easter at home, one more Christmas, one more Halloween... and then I'll be gone. I think they realized that too.
All of the important Easter things were still here though. Like thinking about Christ, and going to church, and feeling that. This holiday really matters more than any other. In my opinion, Christ's birth and death aren't nearly as important as the attonement and resurrection. If it wasn't for today I would be nothing. I would have no hope.

The past few days have been rather difficult. I've been thinking a lot about death. This six-year-old girl from my church died. Did I write that in here? Anyway, I remember her so well, remember babysitting her and her sister. I remember one time she put these things up her nose (beans maybe?) and it took my friend Kara forever to get them out. She was worried she'd have to call the hospital.
And she liked to pretend she was a pony. She liked to prance around.
How to comprehend that she is gone now? I don't know. I can't. I can't imagine the kind of pain her parents must be in either. Losing a dog left me senseless for a week. Losing a child... does that kind of ache ever go away? It seems to me a horrible kind of pain, because for a while it is so constant, and even if you do finally forget for an instant, having to remember all over again hurts just as badly as the first time. My stomach feels sick when I think about it.

We are all so temporary. I guess I've always known this, but it was shocking for me to remember. A few nights ago my mother and I got into a big argument, and she yelled at me that she wished she could tie a string around my throat and strangle me to death. For an instant, the thought of that haunted me. A few years ago, I would have been afraid she'd do it. Now I know she wouldn't; she loses control, gets angry, needs to hurt someone. But it just reenforced my fears of being extinguishable. So a few hours later I went upstairs and I laid down with her on the bed where she was doing crossword puzzles alone and I didn't say anything, I just hugged her.
I guess you'd have to know me to understand that... I never hug my parents. They try to hug me a lot, but I don't really like touching them or being touched by them. So this was a big deal. To me, it was an admission that I am leaving soon, I am going to college soon, and I will lose everything good about them. It was also an admission that the possibility of death was there every moment of every day. I never knew when my time, or hers, or anyone would come. It could easily come five minutes after she threatened to strangle me. Then that threat might haunt either of us forever.
My brother's wife's grandparents rarely fought. One night they got angry at each other, and for the first time in years her grandma slept downstairs on the couch. She died that night. He'll always have to remember that last fight.

I was... not depressed. I think depressed is the wrong word. I felt a bit lost, a bit foggy. I felt confused about how fragile human beings are. It really doesn't take much to kill us. Nobody is safe from death. So I did cut. I don't know if I feel guilty. Not yet. Maybe I should. It's the first time ever, in all my years of cutting (and I've been cutting one and off since seventh grade, maybe before, I'm not sure) that I've ever felt physically sickened by the wound. I thought I was going to throw up, just because of how it looked. That's weird for me. I'm not usually squeamish. Maybe because I kept thinking about our dissected cat, and how easy it was to slide the razor through skin, fat, and muscle.

I felt better last night though. I settled down on the couch picking out all the stitches around the edge of a quilt I'm sewing for the kids at the psych hospital. I watched Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. They looked so young... they're voices hadn't changed yet. I realized that when I watched the movie, I was only a year older than they were. That felt weird, that I could have gotten that much older without realizing it.

Today I think I have the flu. I really don't feel good (well?).