How to Make Friends with the Dark

by Kathleen Glasgow

this book is for the grievers this book is for the left behind this book is for every broken heart searching for a home

Then, like I always do, I allow myself a minimum of three seconds to wonder: Who the hell is that? Where did she come from?

I sit in our small life. Watching everybody else. A bug in a jar.

“All superheroes were sad kids. The sadness made them strong and then they rose up and helped people.”

There’s no end to sad children in this world.”

Adults always say they want you to tell them how you feel, but when you do, they mostly just tell you to try to feel another way,

It would be nice if once, someone would just say, “Girl, you are in the shit and you will not be getting out soon. So here’s how to make friends with the dark.”

Like lightning, missing her rips through me.

Your friend takes the bag for you, because your arms are full of boxes of your mother. You carry her against your chest to the car and hold her that way all the way home.

You think you might cry again, maybe, because the fact of her being reduced to a series of medium-sized boxes, after being so much in your life, such a presence…well, it takes all your breath away. It’s kind of incomprehensible that a human can be, after all that living, just…ash. In boxes.

You are only sixteen, and this should not be happening to you, that what’s left of your mom is in bits and pieces, ash and burned bone.

But there isn’t a single word in the universe that you can think of that would describe the way you feel right now.

I miss my mother so much right now it’s loud inside me, like the worst thunder, the kind that shakes the windows, shoves the sides of your house, makes you feel unsafe.

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.

Who would ever guess that it isn’t your bones or your blood or your heart that keeps everything humming along inside you, it’s your freaking mom, and when she’s dead, it all disappears. You’re just an empty dress crumpled on the floor, nothing inside to hold you up anymore.

That he and his brother are like me. Giant blobs of sadness walking around in the bodies of teenage kids.

grief slips into every part of your life, every day, every minute.

two brothers who act like dicks most of the time, holding each other’s hands.

you are the child, and someone is supposed to take care of you.

But you don’t realize what it feels like, this hole, this missing, until it happens to you.

You didn’t fight out loud very often. Sometimes, when it’s just two people like that, you keep a lot inside. You have to, or the well-oiled, good-looking, and good-smelling machine will break down.

Someday, when people ask us about high school, and dances, and kisses, and all that stuff, I know that what we’ll remember most of all is how normal was stolen from us.

That dress you came in with? My God, that dress oozed pain. I could barely hold it, Tiger. Whatever the story is behind that dress? You are ready to write ‘the end,’ my girl.”

As long as I live, I’ll always think that I must finally be cried out, and as long as I live, I’ll always be surprised that somewhere inside me, more tears are being manufactured, because here they come, splashing on the lap of my jeans.

I have lived through more than I ever thought possible in two months and come out the other side. It doesn’t feel bad. It doesn’t suck. It feels scary. But it feels doable. It almost feels right. I’ll never not be sad. I’ll never not be a girl without a mother. I’ll never not have a ludicrously big hole in my heart. But I am a girl with a sister now, and a chance, and I have to take it. I want to take it.

It’s a shame that it costs so much to tell the whole world that someone you love mattered to you, it really is.

I know he’s done bad things. Hurt people. Messed up a lot. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t matter to me, to the puzzle of my life. He has a place somewhere with me and within me, he’s a piece.

Sometimes you’re so hungry, so thirsty for something to fill you up, you’ve craved it for so long, but when you finally have it, it hurts going down. It’s not a medicine for what ails you. It might just be the thing that is keeping you sick.

All the things I wanted to know about my mother are right here, and I’m not ready.

When people die, it’s like they kind of take your ability to form words with them. You come up empty a lot of the time.

I’m writing this down because someday I will be Alice, with a whole lifetime spent without a mother, a lifetime of walking around with a Grand Canyon of grief in my heart, and people should know what that feels like.

Cobbling together families with what we’ve been given? Making homes from scraps.

You must go on. I can’t go on. You must go on. Because what other choice is there, really? You have to make friends with the dark.

feel like I was one girl before my mother died, and another girl after, and now, at the end of this story, still another girl, crawling out of the jar, but keeping her wings close. There’s so much I wish I didn’t have to know about living.