Air is never enough.
Why is breathing always so difficult.
• • •
Upstairs, my dad is trying not to make a sound.
I can hear the trying.
The specific quiet of someone holding themselves together because they’re terrified of what happens if they don’t.
Just the two of us now.
• • •
That thought goes through me like something breaking.
She was the one who always showed up.
Every panic attack. Every kitchen floor moment. Every time I came home with a face that said everything I couldn’t.
She always knew.
She always knew and she never made it smaller than it was and she never once made me feel like I was too much.
She was the reason I was still here.
I didn’t know that until right now.
I didn’t know that she was the last piece.
The last tiny piece I was holding onto so tight.
The one thing holding all the broken parts of me in some kind of shape.
• • •
And she’s gone.
I take a pill.
Then another.
Then I stop counting.
• • •
The edges go soft.
Then softer.
The room goes quiet in the way it only does when the medication takes over — that specific, terrible, beautiful quiet —
Her cardigan is still on the hook by the door.
• • •
I close my eyes.
