Riley
Some anniversaries mark celebrations.Others mark survival. This one was both.
Four months into the marriage, and the calendar had circled May 14th, a date I’d been dreading. Two years since Mom took too many pills and didn't wake up. Two years since Mia called me screaming, since I drove ninety miles an hour down the highway, since I walked into that apartment and found my mother cold on the couch while my ten-year-old sister sat beside her, still holding her hand.
Some dates you just survive. You don’t celebrate them.
I noticed the change in Mia before I could figure out why.
The withdrawal came first. Quieter dinners. One-word answers instead of rambling stories about Honey. Pushing food around her plate, picking at meals she usually devoured without thinking.
Then the silence spread. It seeped into the spaces her voice used to fill.
She stopped asking Liam questions about the horses. Stopped doing homework at the kitchen table. The moment shecame home from school, she disappeared into her room, door shutting with a soft finality that felt louder than a slam.
Music followed—turned up just enough to block the world out. Loud enough to drown whatever was circling inside her head.
I knew that silence.
I’d lived inside it once.
I realized the nightmares were back the same way I always did—too late, and without her telling me. I heard her through the wall at night, the muffled crying she tried to smother into her pillow, the small, broken sounds she thought no one noticed.
I noticed.
The anniversary was a week away. Mia’s body still remembered even when her mind tried not to. It always did.
Grief doesn't follow schedules. But it remembers dates.
I tried to talk to her. Knocked on her door after dinner, asked if she wanted to watch a movie, offered to take her to see Honey before bed. Got monosyllables and shrugs and finally a slammed door that rattled the frame.
"She's shutting down," I told Liam that night, standing in the kitchen after Mia had gone to bed. "I can see it happening and I can't stop it."
"The anniversary?"
I nodded. Of course he knew. He paid attention in ways I was still getting used to.
"She did this last year too, and went silent for two weeks. Wouldn't eat, wouldn't talk, wouldn't let me near her. I just had to wait it out."
"You don't have to wait it out alone this time."
The words settled lower than I expected. I looked away before he could see what they did to me.
The nightmare that pulled me out of bed came three nights before the anniversary.
Mia’s screams pierced the house like broken glass, shattering the silence, dragging me out of sleep and onto my feet before my eyes were fully open. I ran down the hallway, bare feet slapping cold hardwood, my chest tight, breath already uneven.
Her door was open. The nightlight threw warped shadows across the walls, across Mia tangled in her sheets, kicking, sobbing, trapped somewhere between sleep and waking.
“She’s gone, she’s gone, she left us, she left us, why did she leave us?—”
I climbed into bed and pulled her against me. Her body shook hard enough to rattle my teeth. I wrapped my arms around her and rocked, slow and steady, the way I used to when she was small—when Mom was passed out, when the house went quiet in the wrong way, when Mia couldn’t sleep and there was no one else left to keep things from falling apart.
“I’m here. I’m here, bug. I’ve got you.”
The words left my mouth, but they didn’t land. Her breathing stayed jagged, the sobs tearing out of her like something trapped. She twisted against me, fingers clutching my shirt, pulling like she might disappear if she let go.
I held on anyway. Rocked us back and forth. Let the same phrases repeat, low and steady, even as they started to feel thin in my own ears.
