The Absurdity of Fairy Tales

six

..

I am a walking travesty,

An earthquake and tornado

Wrapped up with a bow.

It's too late for me, but maybe

It's not too late for you.

..

Another unfortunate side-effect of the changing seasons is that holidays arrive. Thanksgiving is first; you can tell it's drawing closer because everyone—except me—is excited for the two days off.

But Thanksgiving was for making fancy squash dishes with my mom and jumping into leaf piles with my dad and dressing up in my best clothes and having fancy dinners with Nan and laughing. Was—past tense. Now, Thanksgiving is full of bittersweet memories and missing my parents and guilt eating me whole, and it means nothing to me. But the small break will be nice, I guess; at the very least, it'll give me a chance to get caught up on schoolwork.

On Thanksgiving Day, Nan makes the stuffing and bakes the turkey and I do everything else. I keep myself busy the entire day so I don't get lost in the memories that threaten to engulf me, never stopping, never letting myself think. Nan just thinks I'm being helpful. I don't have the heart to tell her the truth—that if I stop moving, I'll fall apart and I don't know if I can put myself back together.

When we sit down four hours later, the dining room is too large and empty to ignore.

Nan and I hold hands and say our thanks. She says she's thankful that I helped her out, and I say I'm thankful I could help. She says she's thankful that everything turned out well; I say I'm glad that we have the food. She says she's glad I'm staying with her; I say I'm glad I'm alive (which is only a lie sometimes now). And then we start eating, the only sounds around us the clinks of utensils against plates.

It's so much quieter now when it's just the two of us, when we're not laughing or joking or making noise, when there isn't a presence at either elbow or a dog at my feet, waiting to snatch fallen table scraps. The harsh juxtaposition makes it so much harder to bear; I miss my parents so much in this silence. It's funny how a place so empty can feel so suffocating and small.

As soon as I finish dinner, I excuse myself for bed, waving away my grandmother's 'don't you want dessert?' I can't handle the silence any longer. But my room isn't any different from downstairs; all I'm doing is exchanging one terrible silence for another, and I'm not sure which is better. I try putting on music, reading, doing homework, anything, but nothing helps, because the silence isn't just around me—it's a part of me. It's attached to my bones and veins and muscles and brain cells, and I can't get rid of it, no matter how hard I try. I'm still so lonely. I've been that way since my parents died and probably even before that, too. Lonely, lonely, lonely. Lonely because I miss them so, so much and it kills me a little bit more every day; lonely because I lost my parents; lonely because I keep screwing myself over.

After a few more minutes, I get up to retrieve two boxes from my closet. I set them down onto the floor carefully and sit cross-legged in front of them, staring at the layer of dust coating the tops. Maybe I'm a masochist. But I can't stop hurting myself; I've never been able to.

With shaking hands, I grab the first box—my Mom's—and lift the lid off. The first item is her old college sweater, a sweatshirt with USF printed across it in green; below that, the dog-eared corners of her philosophy essays peek through. When I lift the fabric up to my nose, her smell—lemon verbena perfume and chamomile shampoo—hits me like a thousand bricks. No. I shove the sweater back into the box and hurriedly return the boxes to my closet, tears burning in my eyes. My ears buzz. No. I can't do this. Not yet. (Not ever.)