WRITE ABOUT AN EMOTION BUT DONT MENTION THE EMOTION

Sir:

I don’t know much of anything, really. Only what I can glean from strained stories, things you hinted at in hushed phone conversations. I know your love for your daughter kept you up at night, found you at a stranger’s doorsteps and relinquishing grocery money. I also know she always felt alone, unwanted, neglected. I wonder where you hold your love for her, if it aches like it does in me sometimes, if you hold it in your hands, white knuckles flattening cigarette butts, fingers worrying the fraying string on your bag. I know all of your phone calls to me were love letters to your daughter, even when your voice was an oak: rooted, motionless.

I’ve never had a child, sir, but I have 6 younger siblings, and I hold them all so close that their hurts are my hurts—I would swear I have physical scars from every rejection, every disappointment. 

She was my best friend, and I would and did do whatever I was capable of to help her, but after realizing how heavy it must’ve been for you, after you started leaving questions that felt like sobbing, and telling me stories whispered like secrets, I wasn’t only carrying her because I loved her; I was carrying her for you.

We talked every couple days;  you wanted to know how she was, where she was, was she safe, was she sober, was she in trouble, was she ok. And I told you what I could stomach—not about the powder settling in her veins or how often her head drooped to her chest. I told you she was in no danger. I boasted about the hours, days where she was sober, about job applications, about her maybe, sometime soon, coming home. You were far, and I was so close. I wanted to be a blanket, I wanted to be roots, I wanted.

Maybe if I had been more upfront, maybe if had been more specific, maybe if you had been better prepared it might’ve been easier for you.

I called you from the hospital waiting room after she was admitted. I remember the silence after we exchanged hellos, and I cleared my throat, trying to polish the words that were like stones in my mouth.  I wished I knew you better, I wished we had never talked, I wished my voice could’ve held your hand on the way to the hospital, and I wished, most of all, that heroin didn’t exist, and that my voice didn’t have to be the vehicle that the news of your daughter’s overdose rode in on.

When you arrived, no longer oak, and I no more blanket than the rain, I’ll never forget how hard it was to get up to meet you at the door. How heavy I felt.

WRITE ABOUT AN EXPERIENCE WITH FOOD

She jokes, sitting cross legged on stale white sheets, that she only tried to off herself because of the quality menu at Children’s Hopsital. Chicken fingers, deep-fried, that leave streaks of grease on her get well cards, sickly saccharine apple juice that makes my jaw ache, ice cream that she stirs into a soup and lets drip down the styrofoam cup; I tell her that I only come to visit because she shares, but I don’t laugh.