You don't have to be buried in the ground to be dead.
Your heart doesn't have to stop…
Your skin doesn't have to be ice cold…
Your body doesn't have to be riddled with rigor mortis…
None of those things have to happen for you to realize that your life isn't yours anymore, that someone or something is in complete control of it, that…that you're just…gone…isolated from everything you once knew and loved.
Sometimes, being dead is just losing yourself to the point where you wake up in the morning and you can't tell who's looking back at you in the mirror. You experience too much trauma for one person to handle and then you find yourself being unable to keep going or, if by some miracle you can, you do the bare minimum, just enough to fool other people into thinking that you're okay.
I'm that kind of dead.
I've never felt right since my mother was murdered, I still felt wrong a year later when two of my classmates became victims of the same serial killer, but I felt truly dead when I found out that my boyfriend, one of the people I loved the most, was responsible for it all.
Billy killed my mother. He killed Casey and Steve. He tried to kill Tatum. He wanted to kill me.
He didn't kill my father, but he didn't stop him when Stu Macher put a bullet between his eyes and blamed him for the Ghostface deaths. I thought I saw just a sliver of regret when I started crying, but it was gone before I could really process it.
He told me he loved me, that he didn't truly want to kill me, but how can I believe him when he's taken so much from me? He even took my virginity. I felt loved at the time, wanted by him, but now I just feel stupid. Used and dirty and so, so stupid.
Obviously, I'm still alive, but I don't see it as him meaning what he said. I just see it as him not wanting anything to happen to his child.
When I lost my virginity, I also got pregnant. Part of me wanted to get an abortion or keep it from him, to either spite him or keep my child safe I still can't quite figure out, but that wouldn't be fair to my child. "Maternal abandonment causes serious deviant behavior," that was what he told me when I asked him why he killed my mother, and those words stuck with me. No matter how I felt about Billy, I couldn't make my child suffer by raising it with only one parent. And when he found out about my pregnancy, he did seem happy…
I believed that he cared about the baby, loved it even…but I didn't believe that he cared about me.
I gave birth in early June to a baby girl. Her name is Hope. Hope Marie Loomis. Even though I haven't trusted Billy's feelings for me since that night, I've had hope that his feelings for our daughter are real, just as I've had hope that she would grow up to have a good life and not experience the tragedies that her parents did, and that's where her first name came from.
Her middle name is Marie. Since my mother's murder, I wanted to name my daughter Maureen after her, but I can't now. I want to blame Billy for that, too, but I can't. His crime isn't the only negative connotation I have whenever I think about her; I thought about all of the rumors about her being the town whore, rumors that became facts when I learned about her affairs with Hank Loomis and Cotton Weary. I want my daughter to have something better than a name that will cause others to judge her before they know her, so I chose Marie. It was the closest to Maureen that I could get because I still loved my mother and wanted to honor her, but it was also different enough that people wouldn't associate her grandmother's mistakes with Hope.
Her surname is Loomis. I suppose a part of me still cares for Billy, if only because he's the father of my child, and it seemed only right that I give my daughter her father's last name. I saw the same spark of happiness when I told him that I had written Loomis down on her birth certificate.
After I gave birth, I didn't feel right. I felt hopeless, depressed, afraid…so afraid. I can barely get out of bed on most days, I just don't have the energy, and Hope…I don't think I'm bonding with Hope the way I should…I feel like a failure…
Billy moved in after he caught me crying in the living room for no reason at all. I wouldn't be surprised if he only moved in to make sure that I wouldn't hurt Hope in this new state I'm stuck in. He didn't really care about me, so his daughter's safety would be the only reason why he'd choose to spend more time with me than he ever wanted to.
I don't recognize myself anymore. Everything hurts. My heart is beating and I have breath in my body, but I don't feel alive. My thoughts are muddled and there's a weight on my chest that prevents me from doing and feeling anything. How can I…when everything is my fault?
My fault, my fault. It's all my fault.
Billy should have killed me. He should have stuck that knife in my heart and watch me bleed to death like he wanted to. I reminded him of my mother, the slut who ruined his parents' marriage and his life. He resents me for it, I know he does, I don't care how many times he says that he loves me. He should have killed me…
I'm so tired all the time. I just want to sleep.
