How to Make Friends with the Dark

by Kathleen Glasgow

If you ever get married, or go to prom, or graduate college, all that stuff that’s supposed to make a life? There will be an empty chair where your mom was supposed to be. Taking photos, wiping away tears, fixing the hem on your dress. Admiring your diploma. If you ever have a baby, who will tell you all the secrets about fussiness and teething and walking and all that weird and scary stuff? That if you have kids, they might wonder why they don’t have a grandma, just like you used to, before you realized how sad it made your mom, so you stopped asking.

There will always be this emptiness inside you and beside you, where your mom is supposed to be, and only you will know the emptiness. Other people won’t be able to see it. They’ll see you, moving around the world, just like before. You’ll look alive on the outside but be dead on the inside,

But I keep thinking that’s a thing about me my dad will never know. The biggest thing.” Her voice gets very quiet. “I think he would have loved me just the same.”

“There’s so much about me he’ll never know,” she says softly. “That’s the hardest.”