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7:01 p.m. - 05/27/03
i can't begin to explain.
It's perfect, by which I mean it's right. It's what I've wanted since the first time her voice sounded really shaky, from the first time I didn't feel like she'd be safe. This is the one way I knew to feel better about it all; everyone's safe if there at Rogers, but I don't feel better about it all, at all. I want her to go; God, I want her to go. I just can't imagine what I'll do when she's there. And will she really be safe? After all the time I've spent believing that, I question it now. I question whether she'll be safe in a place where so many of our people are no longer there, in a Rogers I don't know. And when we talk how will it be? When she has new memories, more recent ones, when she has a whole treatment's worth of sisters I don't know? She's going to love them. She's going to feel like they're her family, her saving grace, the same way she does about the rest of us, and how is it going to change when she talks about staff I don't know and girls I'll never meet, and how she loves someone more than she loves me?

I can't ask her to stay, the same way I couldn't ask her to go, and I wouldn't ask her to stay; there's no sense in it. The most important thing to me is that those I love and I be ok. When the doctor asked me how I'd know they were safe, I always said I knew at Rogers because everyone was safe at Rogers. It didn't matter how badly you were feeling; there was still a whole medical staff there supporting you, and nothing could happen. Well, now, I'm remembering all the things that can happen. I'm remembering the Rogers that said they weren't sure Jenna would make it, the Rogers where Tracy had to be taken to Main after a suicide attempt (that failed...), the Rogers that thought I wouldn't last a week. And I know it's illogical. It's my constant need to be worried about her that's keeping me from seeing I can rest now. I'm making up problems in the one perfect place, and at the same time (in a more healthy light), I'm facing that even Rogers isn't perfect. It isn't perfect, and it doesn't give a guarantee. But it gives something far closer to one than a visit or two with her therapist during the week. It gives something closer to security, and when it's your sister, your sister of life, your sister from your family-becoming, whose voice alone means more to you than Tori Amos, who you lose breath over when you let yourself think the thoughts that only girls who've lost their sisters know, security means so much. Give me a trick to believe in. Give me some new-fashioned cure so I don't have to give up hoping. Give her 24-hour supervision so that I can rest my worrying.

And then? If I can? What do I do then?

I know I've got to let this happen, which is such a bizarre thought considering, I want this to happen, considering that just this week I said to my mom, "How soon will that new foundation have some real money to support treatment?" and heard they'd changed their goal. I've still been brainstorming, I've still been pacing back and forth (just like Dave said in the song, just like Leah always told me not to), trying to figure out what I can possibly do. Codependent? I love her. I need her to be ok. I need her. So let her go. Let her go to this place that I love more than anywhere, this place that I've spent every moment of the past year missing. Let her go to this place I call home, while I...stay here, stay strong, try to move. While I stay here, missing my dad so much I'm afraid to talk to him, listening to how loudly they can ignore how wrong it is that he's gone. How little sense it makes. You don't wake up one day and find your dad isn't home, and never have anyone say, "This is what's going on" or "This is when he'll be back" or even "It's not you he's trying to get away from..." Yes, I'll stay here in that, stay here in finishing my senior year, in graduating, in packing my things, in depression so deep and so lonely I forget to live. It can't be evening already; I haven't eaten anything - and I'm not hungry. It can't be this early, not still. I can't be this tired already, again, I can't want the blanket that badly, and I can't keep pulling it over my head to block the light away. The light is my sign that I should be awake, and with the cover over my mouth it's sometimes hard to breathe.

She did what I can never do, again. She called Dave. And she talked to him. And I have to hope with everything in me that she's going because it's the only way to sleep at night, to keep hope logical. I do hope she goes. I do. But I'm scared, too. She'll have this whole new experience and won't it somehow erase mine? It's always been so hard to think of those girls, sleeping in our rooms, curling on our couches, those new girls I would never know. And now she'll know them, and the staff will know her, and they won't be confused when she calls and says her name. They won't be people she doesn't know. She'll be there, and I'll be farther and farther away. (And Brea doesn't write. And Stacy doesn't write. And Dave and Steph, and maybe hope stopped being logical for *me* a long time ago.)

I love her. I won't be ok if she doesn't get well. I would never keep Rogers from anyone. But I'm scared of having it taken from me. I'm scared to stand still while they grow farther and farther away and then see her run off with them. I'm scared it's just another way of losing her.

chord, who's really Mary

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