My Last Innocent Year

by Daisy Alpert Florin

“My mother will never be an old woman,” I wrote once, twice, three times in a row. I mouthed the words silently and felt weak.

Toward the end of the poem, Connelly wondered if his father would have wanted his son to witness his body making its final, horrifying turn against itself and if it would be wrong to leave. He wrote about wanting so desperately for it all to be over and then, when it was, his shame at having wished it.

Something changed between us that day. I’d seen Debra at her worst, and I’ve found that is often what binds women together. Men admire each other when they are at their best, but women enjoy meeting each other in pits of despair.

“You don’t have to protect her,” Kelsey said whenever I worried about Debra. “It’s not your responsibility.” But whose was it, I wondered? Who was there to catch us if not our friends?

“I can taste it,” he said. So could I, how easy it would be to slip into a life he created for me instead of having to make one of my own.

you can always start over in knitting, something you can never do in life. There is no such thing as a clean slate. We take our decisions with us, no matter how much we wish we could leave them behind.

As soon as they were out of earshot, we’d burst out laughing and promise each other we’d never be that lame. But of course we would be. We were the ones who didn’t understand how it worked, pathos, the pull of the past. The sting of regret. Memory Lane didn’t interest us because we didn’t believe in memory. We believed in now.

“That’s because you’re a crumb eater, Isabel, and you think you deserve scraps. I can’t wait to see what you do when you realize you deserve a place at the fucking table.”