{Chapter One}

There comes a time in your life when everything is just too much to bear.

The first time I felt like the weight of the world rested on my shoulders, was at the age of twelve, when my parents got divorced. Like most kids, though, I got my shit together and moved on.

The second time was at the age of eighteen, when my mother, my beautiful, chameleon-soul mother, was diagnosed with cancer. Somehow, I still managed to wake up the next day, and every day after that. The third time my heart shattered was around twenty-two, when my best friend died in a car-accident, and yet, I managed to pull through that, too. I even managed to piece my fragile heart back together after the death of my brother just two years later.

But a human heart can only be pieced together so many times before it becomes unfixable.

Sitting in the center of the painfully white room with nothing except the two neat pieces of paper layered on the table, I finally reached my breaking point.

The words scribbled across the parchment caused a ripple of emotion to flutter through my body.

Anger, sadness, longing—despair.

Each more powerful than the last, each adding a crack in my already broken heart.

How much more must I endure? How much more heartache will this awful World bestow on me?

The pen laid beside the first piece of paper, its tip pointing to the bold, enlarged title.

Birth Certificate. The first thing a human is granted, the thing that signifies their existence in a World that moves so fast that no one even realizes a new life exists.

Proof of life.

Right next to the bold lettering, sprawled across the second piece of paper in the exact same style, were the words I dreaded.

Certificate of Death.

The very last thing that a human leaves behind. The piece of paper that signifies an end of a journey—something that is supposed to come after years of living, after actually having a life. Something that no mother should ever have to sign.

Something I shouldn't have to sign.

And yet, by some cruel twist of fate, I am tasked with the duty of signing something that will finalize the death of my child.

Life is supposed to come before death, and yet, my baby didn't even get to see his first sunrise. Instead of celebrating the life that grew within me, of taking my boy home to his blue-walled room, and rocking him in the rocking chair I built, instead of spending the rest of my life loving him and cherishing him, I have to sign the certificate that'll deem him dead. I have to exchange the crib I bought for a coffin, and I have to lay my boy to rest in freshly dug earth.

Blue; his eyes were bluer than a thousand oceans, but would they have stayed blue? Or would they have shifted to the green that was so prominent in the Jonas family? What would've been his favorite color? Would he have prefered rock over pop? Sports over literature?

Who would he have been?

All of the things that should have been, all of the things that he should have been, stolen from me.

He was a perfect blank canvas, untainted by the blackened paws of society, and yet, I never even heard his voice.

How cruel, to give me hope only to taint it with despair.

Lifting the black pen with a shaky hand, I began the task of filling out the certificates, desperately attempting to contain the sobs that begged to wrack through my body.

Gabriel Dominic Jonas, born on April 16th, 23:59, deceased on April 17th, 00:00.

How cruel indeed.

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Song: Nobody Knows by Pink