When You Were Here

Because this is what I believe - that second chances are stronger than secrets. You can let secrets go. But a second chance? You don't let that pass you by.

Trains are all the ways you miss each other—wrong train, wrong tracks, wrong time.

I risk a grin at the thought. Because there's a part of me that likes that idea. Get out of town and never look back.

But I don't feel like dealing because dealing requires too much energy, and energy is what I lack.

But I am tired of everyone being gone, and I am tired of everything that has tired me out for the last five years of my life.

Why am I doing this? Because it feels so good to talk like we used to, even though I know this is just a shadow of what we had. But I chase it anyway.

I would be a freak with you anytime, anywhere.

To come to peace with the moving on. It is a gift, in a way. We spend so much of our time fighting death, as we should. But sometimes the greatest gift we can give ourselves, and in turn the ones we love, is to know when to let go. To know when it is time—and to be at peace with that.

I am no longer the left behind. I am the living. And I want everything this life has to offer. I stop for a second and look around at all the shops and stores and stalls. At all the people, going about their days, at all the moments they're living. This is what I want. I want to live every moment. I want to feel everything.

Because maybe it's in the stories that the people we love are still alive.

She expected a lot of me. When I was in fourth grade working on a book report, she made me start the whole thing over when she read it and said it was barely even legible. "What's wrong with it?" I asked her. "It's not good enough yet. You have to try harder," she said, her voice gentle. "You have to try hard at everything you do. That's all I ask." I rolled my eyes and revised it, and over time her approach wore off on me and I became like her too - wanting to do my best, expecting my best.

No, I am not all right, I want to say. Have you been to my house? Have you seen how empty it is?

I don't tell her that my grasp on truth, on words, on people, has slipped. I was getting close, so close to normal again, and that's been snatched away. I'm not even back where I started. I'm somewhere else entirely, so far off the map I don't know where to turn next.

My mom was there to answer the unanswerable, to make sense of the fault in our life - and we got through that somehow; we came out on the other side. Now I'm 0 for 2 and I don't get any more pitches to swing at.

When someone you love has died, there is a certain grace period during which you can get away with murder. Not literal murder, but pretty much anything else.

Why she was the happy one when she was dying, and I just can't seem to manage anything when I'm living.

Because I'm living, and I sure as hell don't have a clue how to feel anything but empty.

Do you need anything?" she asks. A mom A dad. Someone. Anyone. Can you arrange for that? "Nah, I'm good.

This is what I'm supposed to be doing this summer. This is how I'm supposed to be passing my days. Figuring out the secret to how she was the most joyful person when she was dying. Because I'm living, and I sure as hell don't have a clue how to feel anything but empty.

Get away from my house and all its rooms that echo, all the rooms I don't enter anymore.

Yeah, I'm just here for - " I stop for a second, because I'm not sure how to finish the line out loud. To see if I can ever be happy, or even remotely human, again. Would you happen to have the magic cure?