The Man Made of Smoke

by Alex North

My mother was a woman who was always impatient to be somewhere else, even when she’d just arrived.

While people who went through extremely traumatic experiences in childhood would almost certainly carry issues into adulthood, the vast majority became decent, well-adjusted adults.

My mind kept returning to times when we were both younger and angrier, and letting each other down every day. When every disagreement between us had to be someone’s fault.

When you’re young, there’s so much time left ahead of you. You can still achieve something. But then suddenly you realize that time is mostly behind you now, and there’s only the fact that you didn’t.

Maybe it takes someone who hasn’t quite grown out of their own nightmares yet to recognize when they’ve just walked into someone else’s.

So many rites of passage seem to involve staring death in the face. And maybe that’s not so strange, but it also strikes him as a shame that it’s what the world expects of children.