i don't know why i'm writing this but i can't focus on anything anyway

i have my ipmat material open in front of me. same tab, three days, haven't touched it. i keep thinking i'll get back to it and then an hour passes and i'm just sitting there.

my cousin died last week. she was 17. she didn't do well in jee and her parents had been on her case about it for months and she's gone now and i don't really know how to exist normally after that so i'm writing this instead of studying i guess.

she was my little sister. i know everyone says that about cousins but i mean it in the most literal way i can. we were both only children so we just became each other's siblings by default, spent half our childhoods in each other's houses, the kind of close where you stop saying "my cousin" to people because it takes too long to explain and also because "cousin" just doesn't cover it. she was three years younger than me and she used to steal my hoodies every time she visited and never give them back and i have one of hers right now sitting on my chair and i can't move it.

she would call me when things got really bad. mostly late at night, not to talk about jee or coaching or any of that, just to talk, just to have someone listen who wasn't going to respond by telling her to study harder. i would pick up and she would just kind of exhale and then start talking and i would listen and tell her there are other paths and that she's so much more than a rank and she would feel a little better by the end of the call. i thought that meant things were manageable. i thought i was helping.

two weeks ago she called me four times in one evening and i didn't pick up once.

i was studying. i saw her name on my screen four separate times and i kept thinking i'll call back once i finish this, once i get through this one thing, it'll only be an hour. i thought she was probably just having a rough night and wanted to talk and i told myself i'd call her back and i didn't and then the next morning my mom got a call and that was it.

i don't say that because i want sympathy or because i want people to tell me it's not my fault, i say it because it's the thing that's been sitting in my chest for two weeks and i needed to write it somewhere outside of my own head. four calls. i've replayed that evening so many times trying to find the version where i just picked up the first time, where i closed the tab and called her back, where i did the one small normal thing that i do literally every other time she calls and just picked up the phone.

the thing that makes it so much worse is that this is the second time. my best friend, last year, same thing, her 12th board results came out and her parents had been piling on her for months and she was gone within a week of results. i watched that happen and i thought i understood, i thought i knew how serious it gets, i thought i was being a good enough support system for my cousin because i was actually listening to her when she called and i still managed to not be there the one time it actually counted.

i don't really know what i'm doing posting this on an subreddit of all places. i think it's because you guys are the only people i know who actually understand what this whole thing feels like from the inside, the way the pressure builds over years and years until the exam isn't an exam anymore it's just this enormous thing that your entire sense of self is attached to, the way parents talk about ranks and college admissions like it's the only language they know, the way you can feel yourself getting smaller every time results come out and you're not where everyone decided you were supposed to be. she felt all of that and i knew she felt it and i still thought she had more time.

if anyone reading this is not doing okay right now please just tell someone. i know it feels like saying it out loud doesn't change anything, like your rank is still your rank and your parents are still your parents and nothing about the actual situation shifts just because you talked about it. say it anyway. say it to literally anyone. if you have no one you can say it to you can say it to me and i will respond, i'm not going anywhere.

and if any parents somehow end up reading this, please just tell your kid clearly that you love them more than the result. not as a preamble to a lecture, just on its own, just clearly, just once. you have no idea.

i keep picking up my phone to send her something dumb and then remembering.

i'm so sorry i didn't pick up.