How to Make Friends with the Dark

by Kathleen Glasgow

My mother is past tense.

I’m alone. Everyone here has someone but me, because the only person I had is flat on her back in Room 142 across the hall from me, and she is no longer herself.

I’m a girl-bug now, trapped in glass, watching everything on mute.

Because my hands are looking for my mother, so she can hold me, and protect me, and make me not scared.

I have no idea how I am going to live with such a giant piece of sadness in my body all the time, knowing it will never get any smaller.

walk around like my skin’s been removed, cooked, and put back on me. That’s how I feel. Like a walking piece of hot, bloody meat.

“This is what I meant when I called it the Big Suck: it’s all bullshit, and it’s never going to feel any better.”

I feel like I was one girl before my mother died, and another girl after,

There’s so much I wish I didn’t have to know about living.