she grew up knowing grief as one of her most frequent visitors.
It often came accompanied by death and the two would take up a place at the dinner table, unwelcome guests and yet always able to find seats waiting for them.
Their earliest remembered visit came when she was about six, when the ribbons in her hair at the end of her pigtails always matched the color of the dress she was wearing that day.
Her father passed away from cancer, and in hi passing seemed to take most of her mother with him. She saw the vibrant happy woman become a husk of her former self. A form she was to become very familiar with in her life.
5 years later grief made another house call when she lost her brother to gang violence.
After the incident it only took another two years before her mother followed; and at the age of 13 she found herself alone in the world and no stranger to sadness.
It showed in her appearance, her once long silky hair the was lovingly brushed and styled by her mother lost its shine and luster and she cut it down to a page boy style to avoid the responsibility of taking care of it. Her face seemed to lose the color it once had and her posture developed a naturally defeated slump, that was reflected in the tone of her voice when she talked.
Her manner grew cold and distant and she lost the tendency she once had to be kind and the flowers and plants she took so much pride in caring for wilted and died.
She grew into an unbecoming teenager. Which didn’t help the agenda of the very very distant relatives who had taken her in with the plan to marry her off as soon as possible, despite her lack of interest.
Which was probably a good thing because she was to lose her husband in the war (whom she didn’t much care for)
She lost her only child; a son, a few months old, to a disease unexplained and therefore untreatable at the time.
After that, her life which was already in a perpetual shade of grey, lost some of its sharpness and blurred in clarity as well as in time. Until
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