The Coldest Winter

by Brittainy C. Cherry

When I missed her, I straightened my hair so I’d see her looking back at me when I looked in the mirror. I straightened my hair a lot. She would’ve scolded me about doing it so much because she loved my natural curls, but all I ever wanted was to be just like her.

He hadn’t known me before my mom got sick, so he’d only seen my closed-off side.

I knew my friends wanted me to open up, but I didn’t know how. Plus, I didn’t need to talk about my sadness. I lived with it day in and day out. That seemed like enough torment on its own—no need to put words to it.

I was mean when I drank. As I said, I was a shitty friend.

Either way, I wasn’t dying. Damn.

Mom always said I was a carbon copy of my father. I always felt that that was some insult,

I hated the parts of me that mirrored him, and lately, those parts seemed to move in rhythmic harmony.

My mind was a toxic landfill of negativity, and my soul swam in those poisoned thoughts daily.

Mom told me to find her in the sunrises, so I tried to make sure to catch every single one since she passed away, no matter the weather. Some days, the clouds blocked the sunrises, but I figured the sun was still there. I’d missed her extra that morning, and watching the sunrise didn’t seem enough for my comfort that day.

“You’re here, but you’re not.” I’m here, but I’m not.

Most of the time, it felt like he was a ghost, more than my mother had been.

Yet at the end of the day, our parents were human, too. Their hearts had probably been through a lot more trauma than our own.

“I want to stare at the most important things in my life a little more often lately. Just for ten minutes or so.” My Milo…my favorite secret friend.

that was exactly when my love for Milo Corti began.

The wrong parent died. That was one of the darkest thoughts to cross my mind, and I felt like an asshole for even thinking about it. But I had. I felt even worse because I believed it. What kind of monster did that make me? What did that say about my character?

Maybe that was why I tried so hard to become my mother—because if I were her, I couldn’t get hurt. If I were myself, my true authentic self, I could shatter. I could break. I could grieve the hardest things so deeply, and that frigthened me.

I was losing a sense of independence, and that broke me more than I thought it would. I wasn’t good at asking for help. That never came easy to me.

the Bean or as it was officially known as, Cloud Gate.

Sometimes one had to break into a million pieces for healing to begin.

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I felt as if Dad was trying to race off to meet her. A part of me couldn’t blame him.

the only thing I’d ever known about love, true love, was how it could break a person. How they could shatter and lose themselves to said love.

The saddest truth about true love was at the end of the day. It could only lead to true heartbreak.

“I feel as if I’m not only grieving my mom but my dad, too, even though he’s still living,”

“That’s the thing about grief. Sometimes, the worst cases of it are when it’s dealing with those who are still breathing.

Say the words I love you as much as you can. You never know when it will be the last time, and I’d rather you drown a person in love than let the moments quietly pass you by.