A diary of polaroid

For Giuly it wasn’t suicide. It could have been anything, the cause of her sister’s death could have been anything. But Giuly couldn’t accept the fact that it was suicide anymore.

Wearing the ink-stained dress Ma brought and the black fascinator covering her tangerine hair, Giuly’s eyes still blurred even when standing ahead of a dozen people. She had forgotten her glasses; so much for getting ready early. The light rainfall wasn’t helping either and the suffocating fog hadn’t quite cleared off since the previous night. As the thick clouds displaced from the vicinity the moisture in the air began crumbling down intensely, and with it almost following the eyes of Giuly.

But Giuly had sworn not to let out any tears on this day.

Her heart felt disturbingly empty without her sister here. The agonizing thought that the bond she had fashioned and clothed for all these years had almost turned meaningless, had just about burst a cry out. As well as the unsettling notion that something more than just black writing on white paper had happened to her sister, made her justifiably angry, not sad. She was told it was a tragic moment, she saw it was a tragic moment. But she had reason to think otherwise.

It had all unfolded the night before.

When the luxury of Heather keeping her company had vanished or the thought that her older sister was across the corridor from her was there, she could calmly sleep, this night, however, was worse than others. Giuly had been awake till late night, almost morning, for what felt like the umpteenth time. Normally if she couldn’t sleep, her feet would stumble across the hallway directly into Heather’s room and get a good long lecture about polaroid prints, what they were and how they worked down to the smallest of details. The boredom caused by that conversation would set her up for a fantastic night of sleep under the warm blankets of her sister’s room.

Before falling asleep, however, she remembered how much Heather knew about photos and instant prints. She cultivated a diary filled with them and Giuly had always admired how important it was for her to keep taking pictures of landmarks she’d explored throughout the years. Glue them to the page and beautifully describe the events that transpired. This diary to Heather was just like the first plant of a farmer, grown and taken care of before Giuly was even born.

A feeble sound of the wood whispering behind her snapped Giuly out of her daydream with incredible ease, forcing her to untuck the pale blankets she had fortified herself in and after getting a good look, returning under the blankets. Her ma. Standing on the edge of the room, Alison was leaning against the door frame. Hands folded and drowsy eyes softly laid on the turtle-like shape under the covers. She knew Giuly could see her but decided to stay silent instead.

Worried, delicate steps paced in, making an effort not to step over the mess accumulated inside her daughter’s now incomprehensible room.

“Are you alright?” Alison asked masking her agitation away.

“Yes.” her daughter sharply replied with a dull voice, inviting her mother to leave without sparing her a glance. Her ma froze in the middle of the room under such an icy reply.

“Tomorrow is her funeral,” she continued wondering, “Are you sure you going to be alright through the night? Maybe I could sleep in here with you…”

The bedroom was barely able to fit Giuly alone, forget her mother- filled with plushies that sat on the cold hard floor, neglected. Little figurines rested on the nightstand in the far corner next to the chair fortified by dirty laundry. Multiple physics trophies atop shelves that collected dust had nearly fallen from the high place they hibernated in. Posters dangled across the walls painted in quartz and the air had begun smelling like a damp field after a precipitation. This was the first time Alison entered another room in the house after that event and God was it bad.

Perhaps she wants to talk again. Giuly wondered, as the covers untucked, this time revealing her full face. Devastation was trapped in her emerald eyes and her delicate nose had shone ruby. “I’ll be alright.” She slowly replied with a broken voice. I really wish you’d leave me alone. She thought to herself.

“I was thinking that maybe I could make some dinner, anything you’d like perhaps?” Her ma persisted and really wanted to have a conversation out of this dull interaction. She had already lost one of her daughters to what she believed to be a lack of communication and had promised this couldn’t happen again. The torrid ocean of guilt Alison had swum from felt like it took an eternity but was only one week. If her daughter was still trapped in its whirlpools maybe she could help or comfort Giuly. Even if slightly.

“Thanks for checking on me. You can leave now.” Giuly insisted as her hands folded the covers back into place, right back over her face without hesitation, not granting Alison the ability to finish her thought and constraining her to disappear from the threshold of the room she had entered from.

Giuly needed to stay alone, remembering her sister a moment ago had brought up a thought that began bothering her. Thinking came naturally and at this very moment, it was all she could do. Follow her instincts. Something hadn’t quite felt right ever since her sister decided to leave them so abruptly. She kept on remembering how it didn’t feel like her. When they spoke, it didn’t feel like her. When they all gathered and ate at the dinner table it didn’t feel like her, when they watched a movie as a family of three it didn’t feel like her. There was just something that had taken away her smile before she had left. It felt like she had stopped doing what she liked the most, she had stopped—

She had stopped searching for new places to explore. Had stopped venturing into the wild and coming home with scruffy and worn-out clothes to take pictures with her Polaroid—she had stopped using her Polaroid. The prized possession given to Heather as a gift from Alison when extremely young had disappeared days before she went.

Giuly had dashed out of the covers, snatched her glasses and rushed them on. Soaring through the threshold of her room, however, the energy stored in her came to a halt as soon as she stepped into the hallway. A chill breeze ran through her figure and suddenly it had gone black, pitch black and the walls had begun closing in too. It had gotten so dark for her that it just felt right to turn back and waltz under the covers and cry herself to sleep.

But Giuly couldn’t do that.

The diary of Polaroid prints her sister loved so much had to be found. Inside those pages, maybe just maybe a reason awaited her. This was the last attempt to get an explanation as to why this horrid action took away her sister. Whether it revealed the whole truth or nothing. Giuly swore this was going to be her last attempt at quieting the disturbance in her mind. Never again would the thought of her sister’s action cross her mind, they were selfish measures, sure, but it had become unbearable.

Amid that darkened corridor, taking that dinner invitation from her ma now felt like the best option. Maybe with her hand to hold and guide her in this hallway, she wouldn’t have felt this scared. No. It needed to be done alone. Telling her ma would’ve turned out like the past sixteen times she thought of a reason why Heather would go. And all sixteen just added up to complete and utter nothingness. This was her final try, and it had better work.

She crawled into a now-forgotten room at the end of the corridor, slowly pulled the handle lifting the macabre air out into the walls behind her and leapt straight in.

A diary. Leather bound and struggling to keep shut. Simple.

A diary filled with colorful pictures and passionate writing of places her sister had stumbled on, visited, and returned home impatient to show others. No one ever knew how these landmarks had been discovered but everyone knew what they meant to her. These pictures were visible freedom. Scattered on her walls and covering the bedroom floor ran hundreds of polaroids each illuminating a wholesome moment in her short-lived life which couldn’t fit in her diary.

Thankfully It didn’t take long to find it. Giuly’s eyes pierced through the room like a hunter searching for its prey in the grimmest of swamps and hiding in plain sight she saw it in the middle of the bed. Right above the dusty covers and crusty pillowcases that hadn’t been touched for days. No one had had the courage to enter this room after the tragic day, no one until the very diary she was holding had spoken to her.

When opened there was nothing. Nothing she could find which felt unordinary. Surfing through the diary entries it brought to mind some of the moments Giuly and Alison had helped Heather create. It all felt magical again. Looking at those pages and remembering her pastime, what she was truly good at, nullified the thought of the horrible thing she had done. All until the pages began to look different.

An otherwise magical and colorful picture book had begun turning into a macabre dark journal entry after entry. The pages which she had sometimes helped put together had seemingly twisted into something sinister. Sheets had been stained in black, some ripped, and others shredded. No more polaroid prints filling the pages with heart-warming descriptions, instead black felt tips ran dry and oval scribbles transcended the pages with hauntingly dark words.

Then, as if it wasn’t unusual enough, when Giuly turned a page there was a diary entry. No pictures, just words.

Today I saw it again, it was standing in the corner of my room, staring at me with tiny little holes punctured all over its decadent skin and eyes the color of an empty darkened sun, big like one too. Its withered voice told me that I had requested all of this, that I had “brought” it back into existence after I had disrupted it, and I was responsible for—Blank a gap. I wasn’t sure what it meant.

Neither did Giuly.

The words on that page cut off abruptly at the very moment Giuly had been reassured that this was no ordinary suicide. Something sinister had taken place in the very picture-painted room she was sitting in. Giuly’s pale fingers constantly flipped through the diary until her eyes were met with a familiar structure. A polaroid print in the middle of the page and writing surrounding it uncontrollably. Like the other colorful moments at the beginning of this diary. This one wasn’t colorful though and most words made no sense. Scribbles and badly drawn shapes fueled its lines which she found to have no meaning but to distract her from the core of the page.

From that photograph tucked into the middle of the page.

It was a picture of her own sister, a portrait. A terrifying smile, incomprehensibly wide, and a glacial pair of eyes scrutinizing the camera while simultaneously piercing through the page it was stuck on.

Her eyes were truly that of a possessed being. Unrecognizable.

What felt acutely unstable was the background of the picture. Warped and blurred out. Almost like a world completely different from the one Giuly was crouching in. Indescribably wavy.

“Summon me and I will come to you,” she told me. She had told me that to do that I had to just simply— and then scribbles followed. Heather wanted to hide it. Whatever it was it was not understandable and quite frankly it wasn’t normal, too. Had her sister gone mad? The following page was the last one, with words attached to the date before her passing.

“Tomorow I will summon it again.” It said, “Tomorow I will save her”. And once again, the words cut off.

Too many pages had gone absent. Ripped apart as if a hungry dog severed it clean with its teeth. There was too much conveniently missing.

In the very room she was standing in, Giuly flickered through the pages of her deceased sister backwards and forwards, settled but anxious. Something had happened. Something out of her control, but she could now itch that thought away, the thought that Heather’s death was no ordinary event. This diary was the proof, subtle but concrete. Something had happened to her sister, something that would have led someone of such a curious and smiling nature to do something so off-putting and macabre. Something perhaps beyond human comprehension that she couldn’t quite understand.

Yet.

As she saw the soil being poured over Heather’s coffin, she knew two things had happened. Her sister had unfortunately died, but the way she had done it wasn’t something so easily deductible, maybe the first thing wasn’t even definite. Maybe all a mix-up, yes, quite impossible but maybe, just maybe probable.

Nevertheless, the most important person Giuly had, was, to all appearances, being lowered six feet beneath the soil right before her. She was dead but perhaps this was far from the truth.

Giuly wanted answers, and she was going to get them.

Someone else was involved. She thought. Maybe not human, but something else was at play here and she just had to find out what it was.