life of haleigh

On the day I found out my dad had a year to live, I was standing at work, typing away stupidly about something I can’t remember now. And in an instant, I was catapulted into a terrible grief I knew nothing about. Like a dark room I’d never entered, feeling my way around.  Gemma called my boss, my colleagues, and my best friends. Ordering one to give me time off, to get coffee, and to buy moving boxes.  In the apartment, I couldn’t even remember my own name. Gemma found my passport, called my sister and arranged a pick up, and booked my flight for the next morning. Early but not too early, because she said I needed sleep. How do I even begin to pack right now? Gemma told everyone what to do. She put on my favourite songs, Taylor Swift, whom she didn’t particularly care for, and made the executive decision to toss my near-empty shampoo bottles.  We walked through a handful of outfits I’d need - certainly comfy ones - as Gemma proposed. And when I’d come back to collect my t...

Sometimes when I am asleep, and the wind is coming in through the window of my childhood bedroom, I can almost feel you here. For a sleepover, the way we used to do all the time. It was just our clothes then, I didn’t know what was mine or yours. It was our day then, we never left each other’s sides. It was our life then, a pact that if we made it to 40 and were still single, we’d run away together and live on the beach in Mexico. I always wake up in a sweat from those dreams now. Now I live in your phone as an unknown cell number, I live in your photos as a girl you used to know. I live in that stain I left on the carpet of your truck when my bubblegum ice cream melted. Now I’m the most hated girl. For twenty-five years in a row. If you’ve never been the last choice friend, undiagnosed depression at a very young age, artsy but filled with melancholy girl, then you’ve never been the most hated girl. But I’ve worn her skin all my life. At first it was the separate group chat with 9 memb...

I think back to 10:15am on August 9th, standing at my work desk in my dress shoes and a coffee in front of me, catching my personal phone ringing and putting my headphones in. All I hear now is the crack of a match stick on a striker. I knew the second I heard my sister’s breathing on the other end of the line. Twelve hours later, I was standing in my childhood home. In the ashes of everything I knew. Everything and everyone that I loved. A life that I perfectly curated. A future I was on accurate trajectory to achieve. Everywhere I looked, there was devastation and destruction. I asked my therapist if I’d ever recover. She said, “I don’t think so, but I think it becomes more normal than it is now.” More normal , another thing that pinches in my stomach when I hear it. I don’t want this normal, I want the old normal. Nothing will ever be the same. My eating habits, and making the bed in the morning. Going to the gym. My favourite songs. All my best friends. A job I used to dream about ...

I sometimes wonder if she knows I heard she’d said this about me. It’s remarkable how someone I don’t think twice about can find something like this to say about me. Point 1:  “nothing to be depressed about” You should always leave your hometown - doesn’t have to be forever. The reason being: you will never outgrow the reputation you gave yourself as a shitty high school teenager with some (probably undiagnosed) serious depression and attitude problems.  Because truly, I think then, maybe I didn’t have anything to be depressed about. It’s subjective I guess, it feels bigger when you’re in it. At that time I think my major problem was outgrowing a big relationship in my life and a car accident that accidentally traumatized me for several years. I get that this is normal people stuff now. But I didn’t then. And it rocked me. It’s the whole reason I started writing this blog in the first place! I also think back then I might’ve had a lot of bad things to say at that time too. It’...

I’ve left a little piece of me to die with everyone I no longer know. It’s been the hardest feeling I’ve come to terms with in this lifetime, and probably the next. There are dead pieces of everything all around me. Pieces of myself that I miss, pieces of people I loved, pieces of memories I can still feel, pieces of hurt that I carry in my pockets. Every so often I visit the graveyards. I grieve my people and all of the places I’ve been with them. I mourn all of the bridges I burned because of the girl I used to be, the attitude I used to own, the emotions I used as a weapon. I visit and I hurt myself by imagining a world where all of these things were still alive. Here lies a girl I knew once: There’s this theory that with every decision you make, a part of you breaks off and continues in the other direction - creating an infinitely long line of different pathways in life. Many of mine lay here. A version of me who got that one job and left that place, a version of me who got married...