Author: Chonny
Email: bubbledubble@start.com.au
Rating: PG
. Summary: Terri reminisces
Authors note: OK this is like never gong to happen or anything but let me set the scene for you. Mitch and Rose got married, Terri left the order, Mitch and Terri still had very strong feelings for each other but never acted upon them, Mitch gets a terminal illness, in hospital long time eventually dies. This is Terri sort of looking back and reflecting I guess
Disclaimer: Don't own any of the characters you recognise.
Dedication: This is for Nicole!! Thanks heaps for going over it for me and a note on a couple of things
i) Mitch was wearing a leather jacket in the motorbike bit - well in my mind!! and
ii) I know it ends aprutly but well I'm in a huge rush to get it out!!
So imagine the ending and I could always sorta write something else to it eventually!! And thanks heaps!!
Feedback: ABSOULETLY!!
The horror of it hit me. Mitch was my age, my friend, my best, best friend who I'd shared my childhood with. This was Mitch, whose mother found him crying in his bedroom when he was four, and when she asked him what was wrong Mitch sobbed, "Terri told me to go to my room, and I haven't done anything wrong!"
Mitch, who played school with me when we used dolls as students and tried to make the poor things stand in straight lines for their lessons. Mitch who had conspired with me to be naughty one day in grade 1, and we threw Eleanor's lunch in the rubbish tin and filled her lunch box up with sheep droppings. We were shocked at the amount of trouble we got into. We hadn't realized how naughty we were being. But only a week later we threw our undies on the overhead fan when we were getting changed for swimming and one pair flew off into Mrs. Mercer's face.
We played dentist when we were 7 and I actually pulled out one of Mitch's teeth. It was loose anyway, and he didn't mind, but Mrs. Stevenson was a bit flabbergasted. We put on puppet shows and magic shows for our families and charged them twenty cents to come and watch. We shared a bag of sherbet that Mitch knocked off from his mum's shopping bag, then somehow convinced ourselves that it was Ratsak and we panicked and rushed to the tap and tried to wash it all out of our mouths.
We lay in our tent on our first camp, sucking on tubes of toothpaste. Another time in the same tent we pretended we were married, and we kissed and felt each other the way we imagined married people did. And on another camp out we managed to persuade ourselves that there was a boogie-monster outside the tent, until we got so scared we rushed into the house screaming and refused to go out there again. We were mates, that's all there was to it.
It was always Mitch's hand I held as we walked in boy-girl to the library, the pool or the art room. Like other kids we went through the usual lists of things that kids try: jazz ballet, swimming lessons, piano, pony club. And like most kids we didn't last too long at them. There was always to much too do at home and our parents complained at all the driving.
We went through grades: 1, 2, 3, 4. We wrote love letters and then decided the next day we didn't like each other, we played softball, but when Mitch got dropped for being rude to the coach I quit the team in protest.
We had a competition to see who could last the longest without going to the toilet and nearly burst ourselves in the process. Mitch, who made himself sick worrying about tests. Mitch, who spent a whole lesson typing groups of A's - just the letter A - into a computer, then blocked it, copied it and pasted it and did that over and over until she'd created a file eight megabytes long. Then we did a word count. It took twelve and a half minutes.
Mitch who broke his collar bone when he fell off the back of a motorbike I was dared to ride.
Mitch, who talked me into crawling after him through the little gaps between the bales in their hayshed, then suddenly panicked and suffered total claustrophobia when he thought he wouldn't get be able to get out.
Mitch who fell so suddenly and madly in love with Rose, that I was jealous and had to make myself like her. At first I even tried to talk him out of going with her, but for once he was not going to be talked out of something - he had his heart set on her, he got her, and in the end I had to resign myself to the fact that our relationship had changed forever.
Mitch and I were mates. We were mates for life. And now my best mate was under the earth, under six feet of cold, heavy soil, separated from me by six feet and by eternity.
How could it be possible? In all the plans we made together all those years ago we never considered for a moment that is might end like this. Death wasn't on our agenda. We thought we were indestructible. And what would happen to me now?
Our plans had always been for two, but Mitch had left me and I was on my own. I felt like a Siamese twin who had been amputated from her other half.
Sure I had Von, and I loved her dearly, but I hadn't grown up with her the way I had with Mitch. The last time I saw Mitch was at the hospital, and while I thought I'd said goodbye, I sort of knew that I wouldn't see him again, and now I realise that I hadn't accepted it at all.
There were so many more things I should of said, wanted to say and forgot to say. Now how would I say them? If I lived for a hundred years I would never get the chance to say them.
Email the author: Chonny