How to Make Friends with the Dark

by Kathleen Glasgow

this book is for every broken heart searching for a home

Thy Kingdom come. Thy will be done.

I don’t understand how things are keeping going when she has just stopped.

My life was small, but it was mine, and now it’s gone.

You’ll look alive on the outside but be dead on the inside, flicking your wings and watching everyone through the jar.

I wonder what other things my mother did without me. Who she talked to. What she…thought about things.

They say, She’s in a better place, and that makes me angry, because what does that make her place with me? Horrible?

“Thaddy says we’re just stories in somebody’s book and every time they turn a page, that’s when new stuff happens. But I think we’re like one of those snow balls. You know, shake ’em up and everything gets all messed up and the snowflakes cover everything and nothing goes back where it was.”

LaLa flutters her fingers over Sarah’s back, very lightly, until Sarah, exhausted, falls asleep in her lap. “It’s like raindrops,” LaLa explains softly. “You do this to women in labor. It distracts them.”

“Girl, you are in the shit and you will not be getting out soon. So here’s how to make friends with the dark.”

I can’t be touched a lot, because my brain thinks somebody’s gonna hurt me again. Does that make any sense? It’s why school doesn’t work for me.

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.

What we try to remember, most of all, is that grief slips into every part of your life, every day, every minute.

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.

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.

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.

Grand Canyon of grief

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.