No one is ever ready to leave. No one is ever ready to lose. No one is ever ready to feel that pain. I feel the ones that hurt the most though, is when they lose someone without actually losing them. Say you have a neglective parent. Physically, they’re there. Mentally, they’re not. Physically, they never left, mentally, they were never there. That’s a loss that can’t be understood by just a story told by the mouth but a story that is told with the tears in your eyes when you realize you weren’t good enough for them to stay. It’s a story that you can’t see by just watching how that parent ignores you but also feeling the pain of knowing you weren’t never good enough for them. There was a kid one time, who had a neglective and abusive father. He mainly abused her mother, and neglected her and her brother too. The little girl spent her years taking care of her brother and her parents. She took care of her mother because she was sick. She took care of her father because he blamed her for his pain. It’s odd how she believed that it was her fault that he bled on her when he was the one who cut the wound in her heart. She came into the world to a mother who only wished she could care and a father who only wished she was never born. She did anything to make him proud. She’d clean the whole house, she’d wake up her brother for school, make food, get good grades, help get food for the house, do everything her mother couldn’t and everything her father wouldn’t. She got so desperate for his love that she took an eraser to her kindergarten school work and erased the coloring outside the lines just to hear “I’m proud of you.” Even then she never heard it. Then, she lost her mom. What was worse is her mom never died, but she wasn’t there. She was physically there, but she mentally was no where to be found. That broke her. That girl felt and endless amount of loss. She felt so much loss she didn’t know what it meant to belong. She didn’t know what it was like to have. She didn’t know what it was like to have so she made sure she gave her all. She made sure no one else had to feel the loss of losing someone who’s not really gone. Years go by and she still to this day does that. She refuses to let anyone, especially any child, feel the pain of losing someone who’s standing right in front of you. That pain hurts more than any death ever could. It hurts to the point you rather they were dead than losing them mentally. I know how that hurts. I know how that hurts because I was that girl. I am that girl. I have healed, but the scars stay with me. At least I know I’ll never lose my scars like I lost my mother and my so called father.