How to Make Friends with the Dark

by Kathleen Glasgow

Things will be fixed now. Things will be okay, like always.

Lupe Hidalgo is an eclipse. She slides over everything like a glamorous shadow, and even though you know it’s going to hurt, you look anyway. And I accidentally do.

Are you fr womansplaining Stevie nicks rn

Girl what y’all are painfully straight

NOT THE FAULT IN OUR STARS

“Books are good. I can live life safely and without peril in a fictional universe.”

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

Your mother is dead. You get out of the car and the sun hurts and the ground hurts and even the stupid air hurts. You feel skinned. Like whatever held you together has been peeled away. You half expect to look down and see your heart hanging out, a slow-beating, nearly dead thing.

I think about that word she used. Cases. We are her job. Kids who don’t have parents. Karen inches the car forward. I glance over at the big windows of the fast-food restaurant.

The foster. The one who will have the face of an angel when Karen is there and the face of a beast when the door closes.

There are a lot of things we never really talked about. Like Heaven. Or death. Like, what happens after. What if she’s somewhere…and she’s scared? Alone? I saw a movie once and the ghosts were everywhere among the living, watching them from trees, looking into their grocery carts in the market. But the living never felt them.

In the back of Karen’s car, as she says, “Ready?” you buckle yourself in and a little part of you wonders if your mother is watching all this, right now, like a movie ghost, but the thought hurts, and the girl-bug behind glass swats it away. You are carrying so many heavy feelings. There just isn’t enough room for them all.

“Grief is a process your body and mind have to go through, Tiger. There isn’t a cure. But I can keep you comfortable and safe.”

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

The one thing my mom’s told me over and over and over for years is I will never leave you. I will always be right here. My mother might be a lot of things, but she isn’t a liar. This has to be a horrible mistake, a time warp of some sort, and it’ll be over soon. It just can’t be real: a life of locked cabinets and refrigerators, bars on the window. Sweatshirts and creamed corn on plastic plates.

I will myself to sleep, because when I wake up, it’s all going to be a goddamn bad dream. And we will be we again, the well-oiled, good-looking, and good-smelling machine.

“It’s funny that I started liking you right when we started working on hearts in class, you know? I think that’s irony, now. Is that irony? I’m not sure. I’m not really thinking clearly right now, you know? Anyway, is it ironic? Because I think you broke my heart. And what sucks the most? Is that you broke it right after it had just been broken in the worst possible way, you know? Like, you stomped on the pieces and made them even smaller. I mean, who does that?”

I want to hurt everyone right now. I want to break things so the world looks like how I feel inside: splintered into a million bloody and sharp pieces.

The girl-bug in the jar can barely breathe. She covers her face with her wings.

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, flicking your wings and watching everyone through the jar.

People keep asking, Do you need anything? They say, This is so awful. They say, She’s in a better place, and that makes me angry, because what does that make her place with me? Horrible?

never saw it on me, but because now I think it’s literally keeping me together. Holding my bones and heart and soul inside, because they’re all split and shattered, and if I take this dress off, they’ll spill out, everywhere, and I don’t have the strength to pick up the pieces.

What

My bpd be like:

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, when I said I had problems, earlier? 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. Too much shit, and shouting, and calling me poor and all that crap, you know? Makes me mad, and then shit happens. Oh, no, please don’t,” he says, turning to me, pleading. “I’m sorry I said all that. Please don’t do that.”

No wonder he smokes pot. He must be in so much pain, inside and out.

“I love my sister more than I’m afraid of him. Sometimes you’d do anything to protect your family. It’s just something you know, deep inside.”

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. It’s so loud I don’t even know if it’s LaLa, Cake, or Thaddeus who says, It’ll be okay.

All I know is, I want to scream so hard it will tear their ears off. Because it will never be okay, never ever ever.

Without my mom, this house doesn’t seem like a home anymore.

And I know it sounds cliché, but it’s true: love makes everything seem better, and love isn’t in this house anymore. Not that I can feel, anyway. Not yet.

I feel like I’m drowning.

POP OFF QUEEN

She ain’t wrong

Truth be told, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with wanting to be pretty, or look nice, or take care of your hair and skin and wear pink if you want to, whoever you are. If you feel good about doing all those things, won’t you just naturally feel good about yourself? And then you’ll feel good about being in the world? Confident, I guess? Is that a bad thing? As I look at my pretty sister, and see a little bit of me in her, I realize what I’m really seeing is glimpses of future me, Future Tiger, somewhere way down the road after high school and college and a little more life under my belt. It’s scary to think about.

I will be in the dark forever, feeling around for a light switch and never finding it.

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.

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

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

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.

“Sometimes you need to open yourself to the possibility of the miraculous, Tiger Tolliver. Sometimes you just do.”

It’s sort of like that poem: I thought I was done with death, at least a little bit, but death wasn’t done with me.

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.

I feel the way characters do in fantasy books and movies. Like when tremendously powerful forces move through them. Like, giant lightning storms or thunder clouds of electricity or power, or something like that, whips through the person, momentarily paralyzing them, and then when it’s done, they fall to the ground, hollowed out, and usually another character rushes in to find them, and picks them up, and takes care of them, and looks all around, like, What the hay just happened?

I will never be able to tell her my mother was alive again, for just one moment. She’ll never believe me. But that’s okay.

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.

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.