All the Dangerous Things

by Stacy Willingham

And some of these people have secrets. All of them do, really. But some of them have the real ones, the messy ones. The deep, dark, shadowy ones that lurk just beneath the skin, traveling through their veins and spreading like a sickness.

They don’t want to get too uncomfortable. They don’t want to actually live through what I’ve lived through, every ugly moment. They just want a taste.

The truth is, people love violence—from a distance, that is. Anyone who disagrees is either in denial or hiding something.

Sometimes, the mind is just stronger than our attempts to override it.

But that’s the thing about grief: There is no manual for it. There is no checklist outlining the optimal way to move through it and move on.

At the time, it reminded me of the stars: how two can collide and fuse into one—bigger, brighter, stronger than before. But what I didn’t know then was that when they collide too fast, they don’t fuse at all. Instead, they explode, evaporating into nothing.

She used to tell us that all those little experiences you could never put your finger on—a tickle on the back of your neck, a nagging feeling that you were forgetting something, that creeping sense of déjà vu that flared up when you visited someplace new—were other souls trying to send you a message. Living or dead,

“Nothin’ about grief makes sense.” He shook his head. “Not for any of us.”

And I’m not just talking about mom guilt, that secret society reserved for mothers that batters one single notion into our brains over and over and over again: That no matter what we do, no matter how hard we try, we’re doing it all wrong. That every little thing is our fault; that we’re unfit, unworthy. That our shortcomings are the cause of every scream and tear and trembling lip.

sway—I understand that there’s something even more unsettling than being alone in the dark. It’s realizing that you’re not really alone at all.

Cooking feels like a chore when it’s done out of necessity—not for the taste or presentation, but for survival alone—but when you throw another person into the mix, it turns into an activity, a pastime. Enjoyable, even. An intimacy in the mundane.

“Don’t ask me to cook for you, then. My specialty is spaghetti. Chicken nuggets when I’m feeling fancy.”

“Because,” he says at last, a twitch of a smile appearing on his lips, “you had your kid with you that time.”

After all, the violence always comes to us in ways we could never expect: quickly, quietly. Masked as something else. Ben has always known that you don’t have to pull the trigger to get away with murder—sometimes, all you need to do is load the gun and let it go off on its own.