Well, I just learned to process grief at a very young age. See, back in my old reality, my parents got me a ton of pets. Not because I wanted that many, but because no matter how hard I tried, they'd always die prematurely around me. It wasn't ever a matter of if, it was a matter of when. So they kept getting me pets. And those pets gave me their lives. I suppose I know why now. But either way, I'd stopped crying over them at four small little cardboard graves in the backyard, and at seven I just asked them to stop giving me pets. So they got me a tortoise, which survived. But a week after, my father died. I was...I wanna say about ten?
He was in a car accident. Now, mum was always very religious. She never forced it on the rest of us, thankfully, but Spectre joined in on the prayers at his funeral. Both of them curled up in mum's bed and cried together to grieve. And that funeral was when both me and my older brother Cold realised that something was wrong with us.
We shared a birthday, but neither of us really minded. We were always close. And we only cried at the funeral. Heather was crying harder than I was, and she clung to me for support, when really it should've been the other way around. I should've been crying on her shoulder, I should've been the one staining my best friends black cardigan with salty tears. And yet I wasn't. I held her hand, Cold held mine. And yet of us three, Heather, who wasn't even family, was the only one that was sobbing.
Me and Cold got right back up after that. All of our close friends asked how we were holding up. And we'd always respond with "Better than we should be," because it was the truth. We were not crying as hard as we should've. We'd lost our father. We only cried at the funeral. And then we moved on.
We'd lose something or someone, cry for a little while, and then move on. It was never difficult, and it still isn't. I'm just a hell of a lot more resilient, since my mother stopped functioning on her own for the following year.
And when Pall died, it was almost as bad as my father. Almost. I'd lost a major figure in my life, my father, and a source of protection, AE. But it wasn't impossible to get over it, so I did.
