It’s scary this feeling. In school they teach you how to feel sadness, happiness, pain, exhaustion, and maybe that’s what is its, exhaustion I mean. Because I am tired really I am but I feel empty. It’s like everything you knew was gone but you remember it so it’s not a temporary amnesia even though oh how I wish it as. It’s like a hole, a gaping hole is your heart, more accurately an emptiness that engulfs your whole body. It’s pain and exhaustion so in a way, they teach you how to feel emptiness, but not like this. I want to forget how it felt to be whole, because now there are pieces of me missing and I know what they are. I know that I am missing my mother, and that was the start of my whole depression. That piece is missing from my heart. I miss my dad in a metaphorical way. He’s here, he’s always been here, but he’s not the person I love, and I guess love does that sometimes. When it’s gone you feel a little empty. I knew the man who was in love and knew nothing else, and now she’s gone and when she went, so did he. Now the only person I know is the man who sleeps in my parent’s bedroom. I miss my bestfriend and the way she would let me cry on her shoulder and then wipe my eyes and tell me to stop crying because I got my two minutes and now it’s time to stand tall and be brave, except when my mom died I got six minutes, and I have a firm belief that is all you need. Grief is a hard burden to carry but you can only cry for a couple of minutes and then you have to be brave and stand a little taller. You have to beat the grief and then the only thing you are left to face is the ghost of grief which only haunts you on the lonely sleepless nights. I miss her on my shoulders. They feel so heavy now that I’ve cried my own tears on them. I’m sorry I took more than two minutes, but incase you were wondering I miss you and I’m standing tall. I miss my religion. I believe in believing in things and I believed in believing in God because God is good and I prayed and went to church... I believed and now I don’t. I believe there is a hell in which I am sure to to, and I believe there is a heaven because my mom deserves to go there, but I also find myself praying to God to please forgive me for not believing in Him. Quite the contradiction I know, but I miss my church dress and Easter Sunday’s when my mom would curl my hair and say, “God is good” and I’d say “yes He is” and now I don’t believe it. My mother was good and God took her and now hope there is no God because then God couldn’t have destroyed our family like that and I don’t BELIEVE IN GOD!... but sometimes I pray he’ll keep her company up there. I miss my religion in the pit of my stomach where it hurts every time I think of going back to church. I miss the boy who wrapped his arms around me when I was sad and said it would be okay, and I said... okay. Then I pushed him away and said please leave me alone, then it was please come back, and that was the cycle, over and over and he came back and that’s how you know you're in love, when you can’t hate someone for breaking your heart, that’s they say anyway. Well I was in love but I couldn’t stay and he was in love so he let me walk away. And I miss him around my waist where sometimes I think I can still feel him when I’m sad. I miss the summer's too, the summers when it all felt alright. I miss the pool , and the smell of the sun soaked skin, and the look of dirt on my little brothers face. I miss the red white and blue popsicles that would turn your tongue black. And I miss the books read in lounge chairs by the pool and dandelions that we believed would grant all our wishes... Now I don’t believe in that. I miss the summer on my cheek bones where my smile would start to hurt. I miss New Year's Eve where I had my first kiss with the boy I was sure I was going to marry, and who knows? It could happen, but now I’m scared of falling in love, because I won’t ever be able to find the love my parents did, and I won’t be able to fall so deeply in love knowing something so terrible could just ruin it. I told my mom though, how he kissed me and I prayed to God that maybe this could work out for me, and now I don’t have my mom and I don’t believe in God. I miss that boy in the space between my ribs where it felt like I was being crushed because I couldn’t breathe. Mostly I miss me. I miss when I was happy and things were good. The sun has gone dull and my grades have shifted down the alphabet from B to F because I have never been a straight A student but I have managed to become a straight F student and I miss my feelings of heartbreak and uncertainty. I just miss having feelings, and I feel that everywhere. And I am exhausted and in pain and I don’t know how to feel emptiness and my therapist tells me that maybe it’s because I didn’t even know how to feel whole in the first place. So maybe my problem isn’t feeling emptiness, but rather feeling at all? So I told her. I have never been depressed and I’ve never thought to hurt myself, but I’ve never been scared of dying. She asked me to explain it and I asked if she’d ever been in pain. She answered that she had and it’s good that I had too and I asked her if she gets sad sometimes and she said ‘well yes I do’. I asked her if she ever felt empty inside like something inside her was missing. Do you know how to feel that emptiness? And before she could answer I said ‘me neither’ and I no longer believe in God, but I need someone to teach me, so dear God... please hear me.