This might sound wierd to you guys, but for anyone who's ever been through something so traumatic that it's been able to reset the way you think, act and feel - this this'll make sence to you. If you've not, well. Make of this what you will.

Some of you may know this, but others will not - when I was 13, my mum died. I was close to her, very close, and loosing her was the single hardest journey I've been through, though clearly it's not even nearly over yet.

Now, this next bit, none of you will know. I don't often talk about this, especially not in detail. But hell, you're all words on a screen to me, and somehow, I think I need to talk about this to someone atleast.

My mum was sick for as long as I can remember. I know now that she was fine untill I was two, and she had my sister. Shortly after she developed cancer, it was treated and went away. Only to come back again a few months later, and it was treated and went away, only to return. And so this cycle continued, getting gradually worse and worse.

I can remember being about six, and the bi-annual familiy holiday to Spain was called off because my mum had to have emergency treatment. And again when I was ten. Our family life was constantly interupted by mum's illness, and her desperate fight against it. When she was diagnosed the first time, they gave her six months to live. The second time, they gave her eighteen. Each time she carried on, it took her eleven years to finaly give up. If you could call it that.

There are two horrifically traumatic experiences I remember, very vividly. Everything else is... Well. I'll get to that later. The first is on my 13th birthday. Now, when you're there, your 13th is a big deal. It's a birthday, you're still a kid so you get loads of stuff. You get to have your friends - all of them - come over for one evening of the year, the teachers relax your case a little. And to boot, you're a teenager now, score!

On my 13th birthday, my mum was allowed out the hospice she was staying in (Bolton Hospice, a place for which I have an unending amount of respect and gratitude for). She was on her deathbed - but in the mind of a 13 year old kid, your mum is never on her deathbed. She's gonna get better, and you know it. Only distant relatives or people on the news die, never the people you live with. Right?

At this point, she was completely ravished by the cancer. It spread, over the years, untill it had destroyed her entire body, but she stubbornly refused to die, and carried on despite the discomfort and pain it must have brought her. She was prone to fits, from nearly any cause, because of a tumor in her brain. She would loose the ability to write (one of her favorite passtimes) a few days before she died, and I think it was this that broke her heart and killed her. She was creative, imaginative and brilliant - but writing was her only output for it. Imagine telling an artist they could never paint again. It was like that. She couldn't breathe because one lung was basically one giant tumor - which was putting pressure and strain on her heart - and the other was filling up with liquid from an 'unidentified growth' in her throat. She had another tumor in her liver, blotches of skin cancer all over her. Her throat was such a mess that talking caused her terrible pain - along with eating and drinking - but she spoke with us anyway. Before she died, she was on so much medication that she could only be awake for two hours every day. Two random hours. Me and my sister were dragged out of school to spend those two hours with her, but being 13, all I wanted to do was mess around with my friends. The last time I spoke to her, was eight days before she died. I hate myself for that. More than I can explain.

From her nackered lungs, she had to breathe nearly pure oxygen to avoid suffocation, and was carted around in a wheelchair because even pure oxygen didn't give her, well, the oxygen to move around without falling short of breath. On my 13th birthday, she made the massive effort of coming all the way to our house (she was in hospital for several months before the end) and spending a few hours at home, on her eldest kids big day. She posed for photographs - the last one's taken of her, as it happened. She took the tubes out her nose, and sat first with my sister, smiling as she did, then with me and my cat. The first picture she blinked, so a second was taken. In the, what, sixty seconds it takes to take two pictures, she almost died. From breathing the air around us.

I think it was bad for two reasons - this was my birthday, my one day of happiness guarenteed. And my mum nearly died. Kinda blows, to say the least. The second is because I remember, watching her there, gulping for air as best she could, looking (and sounding) like she was drowning. But nothing was visably wrong - she was a normal person, sat on a couch - all the while flailing and screaming and paniking because she couldn't breathe. It hit me, like a goddamn freight train. Something is wrong, and it isn't going to go away.

The second event, is when she finaly died. So horribly ravaged by illness, she died at 4AM, aparently in a deep sleep. Knowing it was coming, my dad took to staying in the hospice with her - I was glad of this, because at home he'd taken to drinking whole bottles of wine in a night. Multiply that by "he's been a builder since he was 14" and it gets a little scary for a 13 year old, concerned about their dying parent and little sister.

I remember, so clearly, at 4:03 AM, according to my radio-alarm clock, I woke up - suddenly and for no reason. Not alarmed, like from a nightmare or from something crashing, or alerting me - but fully, wide awake nontheless. I sat up, looked at the clock, and wondered out my room to find my sister doing the same. She was awake and alert, and within five minuites my nan had appeared at the door crying, though me and Sara (my sister, FYI) didn't understand why.

For some god known reason, my dad - several hours later - turned up, a little tipsey and red-eyed, and took me and my sister to the hospice, to see mum "for one last time". Who takes someone to a dead body? What a jerkoff. The image haunts me, even now - there's something so alien about a dead body. Eyes lolling around in seperate directions, tongue limp, fingers twisted and unergetic. There's nothing peaceful about seing a loved one how they died - just a grim, haunting finality and a disgusting cold that bites into you. Both me and my sister stood horrified for what felt like forever. It was like in horror films, when the foreground rushes at you, but the background gets further away - like space is distorting from a cheap camera trick. Only, it's up in your grill and it's all real, no matter how much you want to beleive it's not you're stuck there, and there's nothing you can do about it.

Aparently, it didn't even last a second untill my aunt tore us both away - she was unaware that my mum had died yet. My dad spent the time drinking and not getting much done about, well, anything.

So, that's why I was messed up to begin with - a life of interupted happiness with pain and misery, untill a horrible finale of death. After the whole thing happened, my dad made me swear "On your mothers GRAVE." that I would never get any help for it, for whatever reason. Ofcourse, I just agreed, so wrapped up in greif and shock and deep, freezing, mind-numbing depression. I went into such bad denail that it took untill I was 17 for my greif to catch up with me, when I suddenly became so depressed I didn't want to remember my own name, to get up, to eat. No one even noticed untill I couldn't walk from a lack of nutrition, and I gave no responce beyond "meh.. Okay" and then not actually do anything about it. Just sit around, moping, not holding myself or, well, doing anything. I wouldn't even want to sleep I was so depressed, just lay around awake, feeling like a heap of shit.

I had always been vaguely aware that, through my greif and (still undiagnosed) mental and emotional problems steming from these events and my dad's shit-poor parenting (which continues, even to this day. The latest episode, he raged on my sisters 18th birthday, trashed my room and hasn't spoken to me since. I've left my hometown because of it. Groovy, eh?) that my grasp on time and my own memory were somewhat.. warped. But lately, careful observation has pointed out that it isn't warped, it's completely off the rails, and I have black spots in my memory, some lasting almost a year, I think, when I can recall nothing. I have experiences I beleived in my childhood - from before even my mums death - that I have recently learned happened only two, sometimes a single year ago. Events I thought were last years news are three or more years old.

I am about to take the next 'big step' in my life - moving out, and finding my own place. Entirely my own. It's not how I wanted it to happen - because right now I have, well, all my belongings fit into a couple of rucksacks, let's leave it at that. What's more is that this realisation only came to me slowly, when I noticed for the fifth or sixth time lately that "oh, I got the time wrong on that" or had a dejavu doing something I'd done before, and having people tell me I'd already done this or something similar, with them, a few years ago - to which I have no recolection.

So, in summary, my memory is very, very distorted. It also - aparently - affect the way I think, and lately I've been feeling, well. A bit less than whole, I guess, and it's becoming a stronger and stronger feeling - a sence like something is missing from inside my head. A chunk of my personality, who I am, part of my identity or indeed just random, unimportant memories. Or even important ones, who know's what I've missed?

I don't even have an ending for this story, because it's still going on. I'm slowly realising that, in my head, not everything is right. Perhaps my skitz is relapsing, or something, or my depression flaring up. Maybe I should, finaly, seek proffessional help about it. Perhaps not. Honestly, I don't even understand what's happening, let alone what I should do about it.