I cannot decide which loss is more difficult to bear: the loss of my immediate family or missing my youth. I cannot believe my son is now the same age as I was when my parents split apart. I was forced to spend my weekends out of town with my unstable father. Fantasizing about suicide, but then regaining my my more even demeanor by looking at all of my Espirit shirts hanging in my closet. Even today, over twenty years later, I remember sitting on the carpeting of my father's rented house. And I remember one Espirit shirt in particular, it's coolness large in my thirteen year old's mind--its ragged white and maize colored, college lined strips, soothing me. Sometimes I consider writing about them, my family. I would rewrite some of it, to fit them into my mind in a more loving way.
If any of you, my family, were to ever read this, I am talking to you as I was back then:
I love you. I am mean because I hate myself, and the little one is not as sweet as she seems. I need your help, please help me. I cannot ask you because I did not realize I would need to, and because I do not trust you.
But I miss:
The hill in our back yard
Mom's melon baller
The tupperware contained mom makes chocolate milk in
I miss the university the shirts you two both had, the grey ones with maroon lettering. You two made me think that silly, low brow, overly average college was a kingdom of coolness, an epic academic environment.
I miss dad throwing the pasta outta the strainer so it'd bounce offa the cabinet and on to the counter, just to make me laugh.
If I had known it was all so fleeting, that once we left that place, that'd be it, I would have held onto you with everything I had.
I canot believe it ended, all of us. I thought it was a forever thing. I never stopped loving you.
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