I never wanted to be that girl. The girl you pass in the hallway and can’t help but feel pity for. Instead I wanted to be the girl who you pass and you can’t help but stare because of the her radiant confidence, not because of what has happened in her life.

Life seems to take what I want and all the things I have planned, laugh and then throw them away. As a little girl I would think about what it would be like to be 16. I thought of 16 as this magical age, and it would be the best year of my life. To my 6-year-old self, I laugh in your face. Sixteen has not been the perfect year, it has been anything but actually. So bad I would rather go back to being 12 and awkward. I don’t think anybody wants to be 12 again, but in this moment in time I do. Why? Because it has been the worst year of my life.

Because I don’t want to be that girl. No matter how much I hated being 12 and awkward and feeling as though life kept falling apart (not because it was but because I as an overemotional 12-year-old girl and thinking like this seemed inevitable).

The one thing I did have when I was 12 and only the thing to make me want to go back remains a thing I can never get back.

My dad.

I don’t think anybody fully appreciates their parents. I have never been in a world without them and so I could not even think of a world without them. I never really thought my dad would die until I had my life together and figured out with a husband and children, not 16 and in high school. I never thought I’d be that girl.

When awoken by screams I knew my life was changing but not in such a tragic way.  My mind filled with thoughts like our house getting broken into. Not my dad having a heart attack. When my bedroom door opened and my mom told me to get my brothers I thought a fire had started in the house. Not my dad dying. Not until I ran into my parents’ room and heard my mom telling him to breathe did I really know.

Two days later when they told us he had a zero chance of survival because of oxygen loss, the last conversation I would ever have with him ran through my mind. I realized we had talked about a pair of headphones he said were his and I had stolen. He then decided to try and prove himself right by searching his room to make sure, but then ended up finding not one but two pairs of headphone. That was it. I didn’t even bother to say goodnight to him because why did it matter, I would just see him the next morning making coffee. But I didn’t.

My last memory I will ever have of him contains his lifeless body laying on a hospital bed with various machines hooked up to him. I can still hear the sounds of his heart monitor beeping. I can still feel his clammy hands in mine as I held them for the last time. I can still see the his chest moving up and down giving me hope he still may make it, but also taking it away because of his need of a machine to breathe for him. I can still smell the sweat in his hair as I hugged him one last time before the nurses wheeled him away forever.

Everybody told me to not take things for granted, I would nod and smile telling them I won’t. But I did. My dad in the healthiest state of his life, no prior heart condition or high blood pressure did not seem like a person I had to worry about. He had a full health screening six months prior including a chest x-ray and nothing looked unusual. It seems logical to think he would be fine and alive for awhile. Clearly, God had a different plan because this perfectly healthy man ceased to be fine or alive.

There’s a few things I’ve learned from losing him, other than you know waking up and living without him. Saying what you mean and being straightforward, unsaid things will eat a person alive. How to make coffee, this may seem small but I almost broke the machine the first morning he did not make it. Other people have really dumb problems. I really don’t care anymore if your mom packed you barbecue chips instead of Doritos, sorry.

I’m not going to tell you I’ve stopped taking things for granted and I’m living life like tomorrow doesn’t exist, because well that would be a lie. I still watch too much Netflix in a dark room and I don’t respond to text messages.

But one thing I do make sure to do now is to always tell my mom goodnight.