Spent
On the second weekend of November I bought a small bottle of vodka and coffee liquor to make White Russians. Soup boiled forgotten on the stove as my husband and I poured each other refreshers, spilling cream across the counter. The heater in our house was broken and the girls’ socks hung half off their feet as they cut construction paper at the dining room table. Slivers of paper drifted down to join the dog hair on the floor. Eventually we sloshed toward the deck where we built a fire and set up a tent for backyard camping. Our upstairs sink was in its sixth month of a slow clog, our dryer was losing heat, and the weather stripping around every doorframe was rotted or gone. Our graham cracker sandwiches were pliant in the damp cold, but the girls devoured them in large, sticky bites. Overhead the sky burned with clouds the color of streetlamps. It reminded me of childhood, the sky that lured me to sleep with its sick yellows and reds. My hometown is an industrial town, and my window faced the refineries that lined Interstate 37 like dank, insular cities. At bedtime I’d pull the blinds up an inch or two so I could rest my chin on the sill and watch the clouds flicker. Flares illuminated the sky like a delayed sunset, and I pretended it was an apocalypse: the Uruk-Hai had come at last, or all the tectonic plates had shifted, unearthing geysers of fire. I pictured the earth I knew split down the middle into striped halves, cracked apart like a Gobstopper split by vengeful, celestial teeth. There would be lava everywhere, rivers of red-gold slick and sinking in on themselves. Instead, in the morning, the murky air smelled of harsh metals and fish, and my mom wouldn’t let me walk to school. “Not until you’re older,” she said, but I didn’t understand at what age I would be safe, or close to it. This is what I’m coming to grips with now: there is no safe age. As my daughters drift off to sleep in their thin sleeping bags, small clouds of water vapor forming in front of their mouths, I am ever more aware of their fragility. How painful it is to love these dying things. And yet, my heart says to me, you must love them fiercely. Pour it all out. Spend everything you have, now. Leave nothing behind.