Through the window.
The way he always has.
I stand in the middle of my room and listen to his footsteps in the grass.
Getting quieter.
Gone.
I look at the window.
Still open.
• • •
I leave it that way.
I always do.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
NINETEEN YEARS OLD
• • •
Georgetown is overwhelming in the best possible way.
Everything is louder here.
Bigger.
Like someone turned up the volume on the entire world and forgot to tell me.
I love it.
It’s exciting. Different.
But I feel guilty that I love it.
Both of those things are true simultaneously and I’m learning to hold them at the same time.
Grief and joy in the same hand.
My therapist would be proud.
I don’t have a therapist yet at this point but I feel she would be proud regardless.
I call my dad every Sunday.
He’s attempting a cooking class.
He burned a roux last week so badly that the instructor pulled him aside.
I told him I was proud of him.
He told me that wasn’t the appropriate response.
I maintain that it was.
