9781250209153

Mom smooths my hair back from my forehead. I melt into her shoulder,
sniffling and wiping my eyes.
“I really like Irene,” I admit. “But I think I just ruined everything.
There’s no way she’ll even look at me again.”
Mom smiles wryly. “Don’t count yourself out, sweetheart. Let the
wounds breathe for a bit and see what happens.”
“I’m tired of wounds. I still feel sad about Tally even with all the work
I’ve done to get over her. I feel like I gave her a piece of me I’m never
going to get back.”
“My sweet girls, let me tell you something,” Mom says, looking around
to each of us. “You will move through life and fall in love with many
different people, and at some point, you will get your heart broken. It’s
unavoidable. The key is to not be afraid of the breaking. People break our
hearts, but they create more room in them first, and that room makes it
possible for us to become more ourselves.”
“I don’t think I’ve become more myself,” I whisper.
“You can’t always see the process when it’s happening,” Dad says. “But
a year from now, you’ll see how the pieces lined up. Give yourself time to
heal, Scottie. Give yourself a break.”
I nod, wiping my eyes. BooBoo jumps into my lap and purrs against my
stomach.
“All right,” Mom says. “That’s enough heavy stuff for today. Time to let
things breathe.”
“Yeah, time to leave this bullshit behind,” Daphne says unexpectedly.
“Daphne—” Mom starts, but when she sees the rest of us cracking up,
she buries her face in her hands and laughs.
I wake up exhausted the next morning. It feels like all the heavy emotions
I’ve been carrying these last few months have finally knocked me down and
told me to stay there. I feel some relief after talking with my family
yesterday, but I also know I have a long healing path in front of me.
Because that’s the truth I have to face: It’s time to meet my grief head-on
and allow it to move through me.