Pain is what I felt that day, daggers piercing my still heart, giant hands grasping my lungs, holding them so tight that my breath came out in sharp, shallow gasps. My vision was blurred by the tears that tasted bitter when they finally hit my lips after their journey down my red, puffy cheeks. The tears rolled off my face and made small pools at my feet.

It hadn’t registered when my mother first told me the news. I thought it was a joke, a cruel game she was playing on me. She repeated it again, this time a sob escaped from her lips. I didn’t hear it, though; my mind was murky from what had preceded the cry, the news she had just given me.

I had to get out of there, the place was suffocating me. The white walls, the green linoleum, that sterile smell hanging in the air, they all suffocated me, they we trapping me where I stood, trapping me inside myself.

So I ran. My high top covered feet took me down the small corridor filled with beds, past the silver elevators that dinged, and into the stairwell a man had just exited from.

I needed air; I needed to get away from that place that stole the air from me. I flew down those gray stairs, past a women who was beeping from her hip, and burst through the wooded door to where the smokers smoked waiting for the bus that took them back to their SUVs and four-door sedans made in Japan.

It was sunny out, not a cloud in the blue sky, and the sun blinded me as I stood just outside the door and continued to do so as I moved to the curb. I wondered how it could be this bright out, how the birds could still be singing, how those people could just sitting idly like nothing had just happened when in my head it was storming, a class five hurricane raging.

Each roar of thunder made my ears ring; each flash of lightning stalled my eyes, causing temporary blindness to them.

Blind or not, I continued to run across the street, through the parking lot that surrounded the old brick building I spent so much time in, over the dull green of the soccer field, and all through this, my mind was still plagued by that storm and the destruction it was causing in my head.

My feet carried me through the neighborhood, past houses that were probably as old as Her, but they all went by me in a big blur. I don’t know how long it took me to reach my destination, but I had finally got there, the place where I needed to be, and as I started up the porch steps, my phone vibrated.

I pulled out my small black phone from my jean pocket and read my mother’s name on the illuminated screen, her picture smiling back up at me. I rejected the call, I couldn’t speak with her then, I couldn’t speak at all.

I continued my journey up the steps, to the door, and was about to knock when the door opened. That tiny brown dog had given me away, told them that I was here.

It was her who opened the door, the person I needed to see. She smiled at first, the cage on her teeth shimmered in the sun, but it melted off her face when she actually saw me and my red face, shaking body which was not used to running the way I just had. She stepped out on to her porch, shutting the door behind her. She moved to be in front of me, and grabbed my hand leading me down the steps and towards the path we’ve taken many times before. This time the trip was made in silence.

We walked slowly down the sidewalk, hand-in-hand, under trees, past barking dogs, over sticks. I knew she was wondering what had happened, why my face was streaked with tears, but I couldn’t tell her. I hadn’t come to terms with it myself, I still hoped that it was a sick joke my mother was playing on me.

I was finally starting to believe it when we were walking over the coleslaw bridge, which vibrated below our feet from the cars passing under us. When we had reached the other side and our feet had touched grass, my pocket vibrated again. Same name, same result. Rejected.

As I hit the red button, as my feet pushed a side a dandelion, the tears came back, flowing as hard as the Mississippi River down my face. Every thought came at me with all they had, nothing was held back.

My thoughts went to all the time I had spent with Her; all the times I had seen Her cheery face. The one that attacked me with the most force was the one from elementary and middle school when She’d wait for me after Friday morning Mass, giving me a kiss and a “good-luck” for the day. That was until the sickness took that way from Her, just like the sickness took Her away from us, from the world.

He made Her weak, the sickness, but it could not break her spirit. She had survived the Great Depression, watched Her brothers go to war against the evil empire over in Europe, lived through Her husband’s stroke, none of that broke Her and the sickness didn’t either.

That didn’t matter though, the sickness finally won, finally got his prize – Her life. The sickness is a wicked thing. He couldn’t take lives peacefully, no, he took them in cruel, awful ways. She wasn’t an exception.

The sickness got his victory in the end. She was going to do Her laundry in her basement, a simple task. She slipped at the top of her stairs, falling down them, Her head hitting the grey concrete cracking it like an egg. Instead of a yellow yoke coming out, it was eighty-one years of knowledge, love, memories, devotion.

Heh. I bet She prayed as She laid there on that floor of the house Her husband had built years ago. Prayed to the God She had always prayed to; prayed as She watched Her white linens be dyed red from Her own blood.

I didn’t just lose my Grandmother that day; I also lost something that had been in my life, all seventeen years of it, just as long as my Grandmother had. I lost my belief, the belief of the God She had prayed to that day as She died while watching as her life stained the concrete of her home, the concrete I had walked over hundreds of times.

Those two deaths had made me feel so alone, lost despite the fact I was sitting next to someone as I had realized this fact. There was a hole in me, like some one had hit me with a mortar, where they had been.

We had stayed at that park for hours until we returned to her house. When the two of us had walked into the wood floored room, my phone went off again. I had lost count of how many times it rang while we were sitting there on the play toys, but every time it was rejected. This time it wasn’t, but I didn’t pick it up, her mother did.

I was to spend the night, it was decided, her mother had negotiated that for me, begged my mother for permission. I was going to stay anyway, no matter what my mother had said. I didn’t care. I just couldn’t return to my house in the middle of nowhere. It was silent there, silent except for the sobs coming from the bedroom under mine. I couldn’t handle the silence, couldn’t handle that void. It ate me from inside, from the hole that was in my chest.