REGRETS.

[westedge]

"My mom found out, of course, and… I never really squared it with her in a way that… I don’t know. Things never really work out the way you want, you know? But whatever."
-Jonas to Alex, Epiphany Fields

***

If you're honest with yourself, you have definitely lost track of how long you've been here. You think it's probably been anywhere between a few weeks and a few months.

If you're completely, 100% honest and stop running from your mistakes, you know it's been a little over three months now and, if you're on your best behavior like a good boy, it'll be over maybe in another three.

The thing about it is, you already know you fucked up. You've known since the day you were forced into the back of the squad car, hands behind your back, and booked down at county until they could figure out what to do with you. And this, apparently, is what they could do. You're lucky the charges weren't severe enough to land you in an adult facility. Juvenile detention has a nicer ring to it than jail, and there are benefits to it. Like, not many, but you at least can know that you won't fall too far behind in school, you're on a routine schedule, you get three meals a day and a roof over your head, and people tend to not bother you.

…but, of course, that comes with the price of knowing people avoid you a little because of your "anger issues", you're stuck alone with your thoughts and regrets more often than not, and more importantly, you have absolutely zero idea how your mom's actually doing because your dad only calls once a week to update you. Things really aren't what they used to be, and you know that's your own fault for snapping instead of trying to keep your cool that day. Even before then though, things really aren't what they used to be and haven't been since your mom's diagnosis and things started going downhill. Maybe that's the thing that haunts you the most. This time last year things had been perfectly fine. Could they have been better? Yeah, obviously. Life was rough in Westedge but your parents…tried. Even if they didn't always succeed? And how did you repay them? By nearly pummeling the life out of some jackass who threw a baseball at your head when you weren't paying attention.

But you digress. This whole thing is supposed to make you reflect on your mistakes and help you to rehabilitate or whatever. Group therapy would probably work better if you tried a little harder, but it's difficult to explain to people why, exactly, you aren't. Why you sort of gave up on yourself. It's probably better this way to keep your head down and reflect to yourself and try to figure out how to be a better person for when you get out. It's this little checklist you have for yourself for when you're released. Make amends with people you've wronged, learn better coping mechanisms for your stress levels, make your parents proud of you again instead of regarding you with disappointment and exhaustion. It's these things that help you more than any sort of whatever a therapist could spit out. Or, it's what you tell yourself.

The routine itself is easy. Wake up at the crack of dawn. Shower. Get dressed. Make your bed. Eat breakfast. Go to class. Recreation hours. Other meals. Class. Recreation. Lights out. Day in and day out, things are pretty much normal and the only shift is the weekly, awkward phone call from your dad with updates. Sometimes your mother joins him. But these days she doesn't very often.

…you know something's wrong the minute your routine is interrupted. There's something heavy in the pit of your stomach as a member of the staff knocks on your bedroom door to let you know you have a visitor. You barely have to think when they ask if you'd like to see your dad, and you try to quell the anxiety creeping up your throat as you're lead down the hall to the visitation room. You know something's wrong when you realize it's the visitation room and not the room for visits where people are separated by walls of plexiglass and have to speak to each other over corded phones.

And you know something's really, really wrong when you see your dad standing there waiting for you, because there's really only one thing that would warrant an in-person visit. You barely hear the explanation he gives you above her final moments. You don't exactly register what he says about how you'll be missing the funeral services. You can't entirely grasp what he's trying to tell you about the way she was getting better, just slightly, until she very suddenly wasn't again and there was no way to recover from it again.

Really, all you can think about when he pulls you closer is that if you hadn't been so fucking stupid you could have been there with her. You could have tried harder to make up for all of your mistakes and clean up your act and be a good person. You could have done so much more than anyone ever expected of you if you had just tried at all. But instead, you get to spend the rest of your miserable life thinking about how your mother died and you'll never really know what she might have thought of you in her last moments. You will never get to fix something that's now permanently broken.