A Year of Winter

twenty-three

April 10th, 2013

I wanted to scream.

I wanted to scream into the sky so badly, but instead, I screamed into my pillow. All fell silent when I found the world breaking around me, like so many times before, when no one but myself was there to pick up the pieces. And so, I found myself wanting to scream a lot lately; more often than not was it received by a confused knocking at my door.

“Henry?”

It was my mother.

“Can I come in?”

I took a deep breath, inhaling the scent of my pillow. I’d say it smelled like Winter, but surely she’d been gone too long and I’d smothered it with my own head far too many times to say. Instead I nodded, hollering, “It’s open.”

She walked inside, but I wasn’t faced towards her. I crawled into myself. Perhaps if I compacted myself tightly enough, I’d disappear and find myself somewhere far away.

My mother sat down on the bed, quietly, as the two of us let time pass.

“I know you’re sad about losing her,” she tells me. We both knew who she was speaking of, but I resented it. I couldn’t lose what I couldn’t own. “But you can’t stay like this, Henry. You should be out with Andrew and Noelle, having fun before you go your separate ways. If you don’t…well, you’ll regret the time you’ve lost with your best friends.”

I’d given up working on reasoning with both of them. Noelle was confused and upset and Andrew was hopeless and unstable. I was emotionally rocky and fretful all day, and none of us were happy. I couldn’t imagine any of us enjoying out last few months of freedom before college whisked us away.

But “I’m tired” was all I told her in response.

She sighed, patting the bed. She paused for a moment until I suddenly feel the mattress sink on the other side, only to see that she’d lain down beside me. She looked up at the ceiling at the glow-in-the-dark stars still stuck to the chipping white paint. She smiled.

“When you were little, and you were sad, you used to crawl into bed with your father and I,” she told me softly. Her voice was satin against my ears. “If you’d had a nightmare, or you were worried, you’d come crying to us and all we’d have to do was lie down beside you and hold you. Then you’d fall asleep, and when you woke up, you’d have forgotten all about it.”

I could remember vaguely—a five year old me, sippy-cup in hand, trotting down the stairs in a commercial onesie, begging for entrance into my parents’ fortress of a bed. It felt immense, an uncharted kingdom of its own. Everything now felt so much smaller and so much less mystical—and so much more real.

“I’m tired,” I told her again, louder this time.

“I remember once, you had a nightmare about being washed away by waves,” she went on, unfazed. “You came into our rooms, telling us the ocean had swallowed you up. I made you some warm milk, I remember, in your old Star Wars mug you loved so much—and you nodded off right to bed. You didn’t have that nightmare anymore.”

“Mom,” I whispered. She was quiet, and so was I, until the silence faded between our fingers. “I’m tired.”

She finally understood and nodded. Carefully, she stood up from my bed. Before she left, she pecked me on my temple, running her soft hands through my unwashed hair, the door shutting softly behind her.

❄

Four hours later, I found a mug of hot milk outside my door. I drank it in the dark, and then I went to sleep.