An entry to the 2025 Irish Epilepsy League writing competition was from medical student Gabriella O'Keeffe.
You can read her entry in full below...
Summer with Hannah
Two halves of a broken heart necklace, we make our way around the lake. It’s late July and the sky drips in brilliant pink. Summer has always suited you in a way I could never quite manage. The sun bouncing on your warm skin, your constellations of freckles. Hannah, we have made this journey before, kicking up piles of dust with our scuffed converse, throwing pebbles into glassy water. Angry teenagers turned anxious adults. We swirl our iced coffees in unison and sprawl down on the parched grass.
I ask about the protests, and your band, and Insta-stalking your English professor. You light up, a purple haired supernova. Words have always come easy to you. I tell you about first dates, and throwing up, and fighting with my roommates.
You do not ask about the doctors, or the pills, or the purple shadows under my eyes. Not, I think, because you do not want to know, but because you know I am tired of saying the same things over and over again.
I tell you sometimes about the headaches, the dread, the staring strangers. But mostly I tell you about that great nothingness, the clouds of darkness closing in. When time is both treacle slow and all at once, and I could swear I’ve seen this all before. That feeling, which I do not have words for, in this language or any other.
I told you once, during my Bermuda Triangle obsession, that sometimes I think I am a ghost ship. It’s like, I said, that the crew is gone, I’m all alone on an empty sea, and I know I could go under any second. At times, it feels like drowning on dry land; in the backs of cars, on soccer fields, in my own skin.
In the quiet moments, when all the world feels paper thin, I whisper how I’m worried I’ll go crazy one day.
And then there are the things I will not say. How I missed Lucy’s 21st. Always leaving early on New Year's Eve. The 6th year holiday I didn’t go on, when the other girls couldn’t quite grasp the concept that Ibiza was nothing short of my idea of hell. Manoeuvring my life around endless noise. Hannah, you know I am furious, you would be furious too, at life, at fate, at all the gods you don’t believe in.
You scrape your chewed up nails along your shins, pick at the blood blister on your palm. I see you watching me sometimes, with that big sad look in your eyes. Somehow that makes me angrier, which isn’t fair I know but try telling that to my brain. I don’t want you to be sad for me Hannah.
You lay your cardigan on the ground, and I pull out the spoils of our picnic grocery trip. Two slightly sweaty meal deal sandwiches, crushed crisps, sea-salt chocolate, an assortment of pastries. A handful of battered clementines which I will eat, skin and all, and you will call me a freak.
You gaze mournfully at my Lidl croissant so I tear it in half in an explosion of flakes. We chew quietly for a while, and I tell you about the poets, and all the things they might have said about the clouds, the trees, the couple sitting on that bench over there. You smile at me and I am reminded that friendship is surely the purest form of love. To want nothing from someone but to be in their company.
I lick strawberry jam from my palms and you pull a face and start ranting about germs, as if you were the biology student and not me.
You rave about your boyfriend, his spit-slick black fringe, biker boots. You have always been in love with being in love. I call you a sap which you resent and you push me in the grass, to a cacophony of alarmed quacking. We giggle at disgruntled ducks and toss them chunks of tomato. We are laughing, laughing, laughing.
Your eyebrow piercing glints in the late sunlight casting little diamonds against your face. On last nights mascara smudged around your lashes, the acne scattered along your cheeks, the crescent scar on your left temple. A perfect half moon glinting.
You bite your lip the way you have since we were children and suddenly I am sixteen again and endlessly terrified, holding your hand in waiting rooms. My mother pacing outside, shoes squeaking on linoleum floors.
It’s winter and freezing and I am shivering ferociously. The ambulance came straight to the school and so we are still in uniform. Or rather I am still in uniform and you are in whatever outfit it was that got you a detention that day. You thank me for getting you out of it with that lopsided grin of yours, as if the sole purpose of my collapsing were so you wouldn’t have to write lines. But now we are laughing, hunched over in those hard plastic A&E chairs, and in that moment the whole thing doesn’t seem quite so awful anymore.
Now I know that awful comes after. The endless appointments. The drugs that worked and the ones that didn’t. A newfound fear of showering. The roiling waves in the pit of my tummy. All the days I spend wanting to scream at the sky because really what part of this is in any way fair?
We lie back, pulling up the legs of our jeans, as if you were not allergic to every insect under the sun, and the closest I had ever come to a tan were not three weeks of aloe on my blistered skin.
When the sun gets low we pack up our things, shove our feet back into sweaty Doc Martins. I walk you to your door as the fog comes in and you make me promise I won’t be murdered on my way home. I tell you that you watch too much true crime but I cross my heart nonetheless.
Hannah, when I have unspooled at all my seams, you remind me what living is for.
For 3 am phone calls. For my endless love of Emily Dickinson. For Twilight marathons. For that Fall Out Boy album you won’t shut up about. For student fridges and failed exams. For getting on with it all.
For seeing ourselves as we are and once were; a sisterhood forged in candy rings and scabbed knees, an explosion of youth, two halves of a broken heart necklace.