The Conditions of Will

by Jessa Hastings

I know how you’re supposed to feel when a parent dies. People often experience a loss of identity, a crisis of self. They question who they are and their place in the world as though their parent themselves anchored them on to the planet.

But why would I be going into shock at the loss of a parent I lost so many years ago already?

Oh, oh i like her.

Mortality is unbearably confronting, so much so that lots of people spend their whole lives trying to live as though it doesn’t chain them like it does the rest of us.

The idea that it ends—that it all ends—that everything you spend your life doing and building toward one day amounts to actually nothing the second you take your last breath.

It’s why people have children. To exist beyond their existence.

Sometimes it’s easier to play the characters we’ve been assigned. Maryanne is the Madonna. I am the whore.

Is thisbstory about me, damn lol

Then she told him to get rid of the boat and Dad said no. She said he had to because Oliver and I used it to avoid our problems, and he said he thought we used it to avoid her. She was so angry she made him sleep on the couch that night and sulked all the morning through, but even still, he wouldn’t cave.