We Are Okay

by Nina LaCour

And in our house, we enjoyed our togetherness but we enjoyed our apartness, too.

I have only just learned how to be here. Life is paper-thin and fragile. Any sudden change could rip it wide-open.

Even the good places are haunted.

“I can’t tell,” I say, “if the trouble is coming or if it’s passed and already left them.” “Or maybe they’re in the middle of it,” she says. “Something is happening with the hearts.”

There’s no way of getting it back. The confidence. The easy laughter. The sensation of having left home only for a little while. Of having a home to return to.

I don’t know if I still love her in the way that I used to, but I still find her just as beautiful.

a different future is unfurling in my head—one where I knew what Gramps’s prescriptions were for, and I watched to make sure he took them, and he took me along to his appointments and his doctors told me what to watch for.