19

 

 

 

 

19

 

 

Take a thick black marker and draw a line. Before Carris, after Carris. Hold the pen in place too long and watch the ink spread into a wide, bleeding dot. The point of hesitation before we launched off the edge.

Those final days.

I didn’t know my mother and Clem weren’t friends enough for me. This word Clem chose for me: Lonely. When Clem was gone, I didn’t know I wasn’t friend enough for my mother. The word my mother chose for herself: Isolated.

When Clem was away, my mom and me spent our evenings and hours of our nights together, curled up with popcorn and salted crackers, watching dumb TV shows. We still do this now when we can, but it was different then because the house in Carris was home. Not ‘we can be anywhere we want to be’ home, but the home where our pillows smelled like our hair, there wasn’t a room that didn’t have signs of us in it, and we all knew the exact right way to jimmy the back door handle so it wouldn’t stic