Just a small piece I wrote about Ethan and his HD, even though we're past that storyline, I still thought it was worth writing about as it's a really touching topic.
TW mention of suicide.
I should never have even opened it. I knew I shouldn't have.
It's funny how just a letter can affect an entire life. Just a few typed words said something which made my insides twist and burn. My heart skipped a beat and I felt a lump in my throat.
That's how it'll always feel.
The realisation that I'm not like everyone else, and one day soon, my brother will become my carer.
The thought brings tears to my eyes, which I wipe away quickly. After all, pretending it doesn't exist means that it isn't there. Doesn't it? At least it blocks out that feeling surrounding me, all the time.
The drowning feeling.
It's like discovering we were adopted, it felt like I was walking barefoot across the stones. Painful. Then as more truths came out, I began wading into the ocean, until my whole head is submerged. The thing is, I'm going to keep walking deeper into the waves until my lungs are filled with water.
The water is the realisation. The depression. The aftertaste left in your mouth after saying those words "I have Huntington's disease."
I can scream it into a mirror all I like, try and make sense of it, but nothing works. It's always going to be there, lurking behind me and ready to attack at any time. It's already behind me, I can feel the breath on my neck.
My hands will start shaking, my memories will start fading, everything will go wrong. I'll have to run up to my brother one day, tears streaming down my face, and tell him it's begun.
The end of my life is nearing, and it's just the beginning.
Although I know it's only a matter of time before I drown underneath the water covering me, I keep the smile on my face, because nothing is worse than letting the disease win.
Somedays I want to give up. Put my head underwater and leave the shore. Forgetting about everyone I'd leave behind, the life I'd crafted and worked so hard on, forgotten.
It'd be easier to do that, wouldn't it?
I wish I could. But I have no strength left.
One of the saddest things is, before the disease showed up on that letter, I wouldn't have considered suicide.
Now I do, though. It just goes to show that even though the disease hasn't begun, it's still controlling me.
It'll continue to do so until the day I die.
I still wish I hadn't have read that letter.