My parents are still stuck in a pattern that is comfortable to them. A pattern where I am a child, still. I have more understanding of that now than I did in my twenties. They still see me as this visually impaired, clumsy little girl, even though I’m an independent adult who lives on her own.

At your burial I was alone, as I always was, you know / I dream to have what you have, you'd say, I...envy you /I have today what you had then: a woman to love, a plan

Fender benders, detonated friendships, roommates furious with my lack of cleanliness, drunken declarations of love to undeserving boys. But more difficult than all of this was the sense underneath it all that I didn’t quite fit anywhere, that maybe I was irreversibly and fundamentally broken. 

If I gave you flowers, I would give you a bouquet of daisies, to remind you of when you cultivated me and brought me into the world.

It was a period of my life I think back on as dark gray, a time of sustained unhappiness. I didn’t like commuting. I didn’t like my job. I looked for a stained glass woman at a stop light. 

I am a year older than you ever reached, but the word mother remains a foreign language tangled in my throat.

It’s been four months and counting. Why is Dad holding on? Is he waiting for me to say the words I never could? Somewhere under that gruff exterior, does he believe there is unfinished business between us?