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

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

I did not think it would happen in a Biology lab room that still stank of the cows’ eyeballs we’d dissected a few days before. Cows’ eyeballs are surprisingly springy

Suddenly the smear of acne across his jawline wasn’t something I was embarrassed for, for him, but something I found tender, and wanted to touch.

“Scooby Doo is still fuckin’ on TV? That is crazy, dudes. It’s been like forty years.”

He’s a chance, a tiny, bedazzled chance for me to be someone different.

Is a sense of humor a viable component of DNA?

“Girls, you don’t have to go to a whole other country to have sex. Just do it on the couch when your parents go out for groceries, okay? And use protection.”

Lol

Even though they were both hurt, and sick, in the same, and different, ways, the boy and the girl seemed nice and tender to each other, and I liked that.

I think this is The Fault in our Stars

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

One hour ago my very first kiss felt plush, just like Cake said it would. But that’s all gone now, every sugary and plush second stolen. Poof.

The pain feels good, because there are tsunamis of things happening inside me that I don’t understand.

and I would never, never, never, not in a million years, have left my mother to die alone. That’s the sort of thing a bad daughter would do.

This is how i feel because my dad died alone & was unwell

The last thing I said to my mom was “Why can’t you ever just fucking leave me alone?”

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

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

You were kissing a boy when your mother’s brain exploded.

You are silent. Whatever words you might have had left are drifting away. Inside the glass, the girl-bug drops her eyes. She’s tired now.

Because my hands are looking for my mother, so she can hold me, and protect me, and make me not scared.

“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.”

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.

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.

You’re only sixteen, and you wish you’d known how to prepare for the sheer weight of it.

I’m stuck in a bizarre snow globe of grief now, someone controlling my destiny with just one tiny shake?

What you had left to lose is already gone,

“Listen with your heart. That’s all that matters.”

the music an ocean that washes the bleakness away and rocks me to sleep, far, far away from the black hole.

Last night scared me, how calm I felt, thinking about killing myself.

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

The whole idea of reading a novel, or a poem, is to come up with your own ideas about it.

How does a brain just . . . explode? She wasn’t sick. She had a headache. Just a headache.

The guilt that waves over you is hot and makes you feel very, very small. The wet cement comes again, pressing down on you.

The last minutes of your mother’s life, she probably thought you hated her.

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

The world is full of tears, and I’m starting to drown.

From now on, will you listen more closely to the world, to its sounds, in case she’s trying to talk to you? Trying to send a message.

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.

Shayna grunts. “I spent a lot of money on the plane ticket here.” She glances back at me. “I hope you’re worth it!”

Yeesh

Where do people go when they die? If my mother is somewhere, where is she? If we have souls, what happens to them? Do they just . . . float somewhere? Like vapor? It makes me dizzy, thinking about it all.

What if, in the end, all we are is a bunch of dirty clothes and gritty bits of oatmeal soap, to be thrown out and left on the street?

And your parents are supposed to die when you’re older, not when you’re young. That’s the way life is supposed to work.

the universe shouldn’t let your parents die when they are still young, either.

The girl-bug blinks and blinks. A mess, she says. A mess! Blood is blood.

“I might be in mourning, but that doesn’t mean I have the desire to shuffle off this mortal coil.”

I have a sister, and she’s teaching me how to drive a car, like sisters do. Like family does.

This book is making me wish i had an older sister.

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.

You use her so you don’t have to live, June. And that means she never gets to live, either. What are you so afraid of?

Oof

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

but perhaps this is the new me: a merciless, mourning girl who lashes out.

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.