I didn’t outright intend to stop taking my medication—never was it a conscious thought or decision. It’s not as if I want to off myself in particular. I know it’s what keeps me alive. Every time my heart flutters in that distinctive troubling way and I don’t pass out cold, I know I have my beta blockers to thank.

Usually I take them after school or work depending on the day. I do this because the side effects can sometimes be awful. The pills give me headaches and for a while after I take them, I have trouble focusing on anything at all. That means I can’t take them in the mornings before school or work.

Then Harry called me on my lunch break but I told myself I was too busy putting the finishing touches on my business report to answer. Really, I was too chicken to talk to him. On top of that, my report is due tomorrow. It has to be perfect and I can’t think about the fact that he even has my number. Shortly after the missed call, I received a prompt text message informing me of how rude it is to ignore someone.

Of course I didn’t reply to that, either, and it still plays on my mind.

Yes, I’m as pathetic as I sound.

When it comes time to take my medication I’m busy rushing back and forth from my bedroom to the bathroom down the hallway and thinking about how pitiful I am for being hung up on a guy I don’t even know.

I have the day off from work. I will tomorrow, too, but I have a meeting with my client to set up the graphic design job at lunch and I’ll spend my Friday night hard at work on it.

Today’s the only day I’ll have time to drive out to Ashburn and visit Grandma at The Renaissance. She’ll all I have left here in Chicago. Mom lives in New York. She’s been off on some trip with her fiancé in Europe for the past month, too, so I’ve hardly heard from her.

I feel especially alone, and I have to see Grandma. Never mind my guilt over sticking her in a nursing home six months ago. Her Alzheimer’s had gotten worse. With school, work and the loss of Caleb fresh and weighing on my shoulders, I just didn’t have the time to care for her. Not like she deserves. Once again, I shove my depressing thoughts of having let down yet another person to the back of my mind.

Visiting hours at the home end at seven o’clock. By the time I get there it’ll be close to five thirty and an hour and a half will never be enough. Not since Caleb and I started living with her when I was eight years old, after Dad. I saw more of Grandma than I ever did of Mom. She was never really in the picture, anyhow. She and Dad separated when I was little.

On my way back from the bathroom my hip bumps the small night table by my bed and the movement sends my journal flying to the floor with a resounding thump. My shirt is halfway on, one sleeve dangling while I wrestle to put my arm through the other. I pick it up with my free hand, swearing softly at my ridiculous rush and head back out from my bedroom. I release a small victorious laugh when I tug the t-shirt down my torso and it’s only now I realize I’m still holding my journal.

There’s isn’t anything special about it. I waste a couple of seconds by flipping it over to see which page it had turned to. Of course, it had fallen onto the floor and opened just after the cover because I put a huge crack in its spine when I was about thirteen years old.

I’ve had it that long. It’s matte grey suede and has certainly seen better days. On the very first page is a list I started what feels like a decade ago, but just as I knew I wouldn’t, I still haven’t ticked off a single one of its items.

With a short disgruntled look at the list, I toss it onto the sofa without much thought and grab my keys off the coffee table before heading out the door.

By now my meds have been completely forgotten about. That’s when and how I stopped taking them.

I make the drive out the suburbs in my near vintage Toyota Camry—it was Grandma’s car until she got sick. The drive should’ve only taken about a half an hour, but because of the traffic I arrive at the nursing home much later than I hoped.

When my grandmother greets me with a blank, glazed look in her eye and her fingers twitch in her lap as if she’s knitting, though, I can’t help but to wonder if it’s a good thing I don’t get to witness any more of her deterioration than I have to.

“Grams,” I start, but my voice hitches near the end and becomes distorted through a thick veil of grief. Instead of crying like I so desperately want to, I sit on her bed and face her. She sits rigidly in her chair with a blanket over her lap. I resist the urge to snap my fingers for her attention because I’ve tried it before—it doesn’t work and only makes me feel worse. One last try: I use her name. “Elsie?”

It’s no use. She doesn’t respond. I shouldn’t have expected her to, since she hasn’t in weeks now, but each time it hurts that much worse.

Grandma and I share the same blue eyes—which Dad inherited too. She doesn’t have the heart disorder like he did or I do, so it’s guessed it runs on my grandfather’s side of Dad’s family. Grandpa died before I was born, but Caleb remembered him.

Caleb. I hate myself for thinking of him right now, when he’s dead and Grandma doesn’t have much time left either. It’s too much for me to handle, let alone consciously dwell on.

Instead of fleeing and going home to sob myself to sleep, I start to talk. It’s good for her to hear a familiar voice, the nurses always say. Even if she doesn’t respond, they say, she hears. I think she’s in a whole other world. “It’s Dad’s birthday on Sunday. I know how we always…”

I can’t finish. More than anything, I’d love to talk about how before Dad died we’d always sit down and watch a game of baseball together as part of the celebration. If we were lucky we’d go out to Wrigley field and watch a game, usually with the Cubs even though Dad didn’t care for the team. He just loved the sport, so we did too as an extension. After Dad died, we carried on the tradition. Just to feel closer to him. I recall the Sundays we spent at the field, just me, Dad, and Caleb, and I’ve never felt so alone.

Because Caleb’s gone now, too, and the house feels empty enough without him. Having Grandma in a nursing home makes things that much harder, but I know soon enough I won’t have her, either. Then I’ll be the true definition of alone. Family isn’t supposed to be like this—you shouldn’t have to watch the people you love die from such a young age. You shouldn’t be affected by the same disorder that took your father. Yet here I am, sad and perpetually ill and alone.

I want to talk about how there’s a Cardinals game on Sunday and how Dad would have loved to watch his favorite team on his birthday, and how I wish for nothing more than to be able to sit back on the couch with him and Caleb and watch the game. Like we always used to.

For another five minutes I sit there in silence, checking my phone uselessly and avoiding Harry’s text. He has no idea what he’s trying to get himself into. My eyes burn from withheld tears until one of the nurses calls me out into the hallway.

“Hello, Julia,” Bridgette’s one of the younger nurses, new to the home. I like her; she cares for the patients. Grandma was her first at this home, and I suspect because of that Bridgette has a soft spot in her heart for Grandma.

“Hey,” I reply, as quiet as ever, and finger the sleeves of my jacket from sheer nerves. I don’t want any bad news today, not when things feel like they’re piling on me more and more by the second. “She still isn’t responding.”

The way I say it, so flat, makes me seem like I don’t care as much as I do, as if I’m one of those spoiled grandkids who sticks their relatives in a nursing home and leaves them there to rot. I’m not one of those kids—even though sometimes late at night when I’m trying to sleep I can’t help but to cry into my pillow, I truly do feel like I am.

“She was doing better yesterday.” Bridgette lays a warm hand on my shoulder. My own hands are so cold I’m sure they would feel like chunks of ice to others. My forgotten medication still doesn’t run through my mind, not even when I think about my hands—a direct result of the beta blockers.

“What? What did she do? Did she say anything?” I can’t help the flood of questions, though I hate myself a little more for not being around when Grandma was coherent.

“She told me about a dream she had, of James,” she smiles at that. James was Grandma’s husband. My grandfather. “And then she asked me to change the TV to Days of Our Lives.”

A small strangled laugh escapes my throat, and to it there’s a distinct, almost hysteric note. “That’s—that’s good. I wish I was there to see her. I haven’t talked to her in so long.”

“Oh, honey, you know how it is,” Bridgette sighs and shakes her head as she looks at my near-shaking form, eyes soft. “She has good days and bad days.”

I nod. I know that and I accept it, and I still hate it.

---

Later that night, after I have my final business report primed, finished and ready to be passed in tomorrow morning, I receive another text from Harry.

I think it’s cute that you’re ignoring me. x

As stubborn as I’ve always been, I don’t reply. I feel guilty for being bitchy to a guy who did nothing but buy me tea and ask me for my number. Eventually, though, I know he’ll stop texting. He’ll give up and he’ll leave, just like almost everyone else has.

Exhausted, I sit down on the sofa in the living room and turn on the television to create some sort of noise. Just because I spend a lot of my free time at home doesn’t mean I like to. Heck, I avoid Grandma’s room at all costs. I used to look forward to Caleb’s sporadic visits, and I can’t even have those any more. I’m truly alone.

Beside me my journal lays on the plush dark blue cushion innocently. Even though I shouldn’t, I think about the list. Originally it was just a silly thing I created when I was a younger less sad (but still pretty sad) version of myself. Then it turned into something I adhered to every day. Even after all these years nothing has been crossed off, and that fact in itself is lamentable. Back then it was my own low key version of a bucket list—to have my first kiss, to swim in the ocean, to go to a concert. Silly things. Then, somehow over the years and I became even more jaded, it turned into things I would never do or allow myself to do.

Sometimes it helps, though, to revisit it. Especially after days like today. To reassure myself that these are the things that will never change and I will never lose, because I never had them in the first place. It’s pathetic, but it works.

My journal is in my lap, and I look down at the cover blankly. I think about Dad, his birthday on Sunday. I think about how it’s been over a year since Caleb died. I think about Grandma. I think about all the sad thoughts I’ve written down in my journal about all of this. I know I should allow myself to cry, but I don’t.

Instead, I add a twelfth item to my list.

To not be alone anymore.

Notes

The first and one of the only chapters without Harry. He'll be in the next, and things... things will get interesting ;)

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