How to Make Friends in the Dark

by Kathleen Glasgow

I need my mother to come get me, to save me from the fact that my mother is dead.

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.

I remember that for all my wanting a dad, or at least the story of a dad, I never didn’t want her, I never didn’t love her, I never didn’t love the well-oiled, good-looking, and good-smelling machine.

the closet after months and years? I think of Thaddeus. How many kids here go home to parents who are fucked up and do bad stuff, like hit them? And then they come to school like nothing’s happened.

Other kids had sweet sixteens and quinceañeras with cakes and streamers and DJs and bouncy houses and credit cards and shopping trips and plastic and gloss. You have always been lonely and you have never admitted it.

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.

“Tiger, the last thing your mama probably wished for you was to be happy. Not to wear a dress until it’s falling off you. Not to hurt yourself in her memory, and to lash out at others. No mother wants that.”

“You don’t honor your mother by wearing a dress, honey. You honor your mother by remembering her, and holding her dear, right here.” She taps her heart.

Sometimes I feel like those guys in that weird play Hoffmeister made us read. I think about what those two odd guys said. 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.