Bad Intentions

/3:2/

/3:2/

I sat on the porch watching the sun hide behind the moon. Sunsets were always a bit tedious to me. They kind of made me rethink it. It was so routine and honestly a bit boring. But people loved them. People took so much pleasure in watching a ball of gas slide into the sky and then 12 hours later slide away like it never existed. Kind of similar to people. Everyone takes so much pleasure into people coming into their lives and then when they leave they simply replace the hole that person left with another person. But each person is different. So when one leaves a heart shaped hole it's a bit difficult trying to shove a fucking cylinder in their.

Asher was my cylinder.

Everyone has a cylinder. A person they use to fill the aching that one left in your heart. My hole was worn out by now. I was probably missing a heart, a cube and a pyramid by now.

The screen door opened presenting Rosalinda. She smiled at me and say beside me on the porch.

"You are the strongest person I know, do you know that?" She said. My eyes widen and my heart pounded. I'd spent years wondering what Rose sounded like and here she was talking to me. On my porch at night.

"Rosalinda." I muttered silently as thought it was some big secret for her to talk.

"Yes, I do in fact have a voice." She chuckled.

"Does anyone else know you can talk? Or that you're not Mexican. Rosalinda, not to sound racist or anything but we all thought you were Mexican." I admitted.

"Not all Hispanics are Mexican."

"Are you Hispanic?"

"I'm from Portugal."

"Well, this day is just getting crazier and oddly this is the most insane part."

"I felt badly about not coming to your mother's funeral. I've known her for so long. It's wrong of me not to have went." Rosalinda says.

"Not that she wouldn't have forgiven you."

"Right."

"Why now? I mean why now when everything is falling apart."

"Why what?"

"Why talk now?" I asked.

"I had nothing to say. Nothing that would've made a difference."

"But now you do?" I asked my face emoting to the tone of my voice.

"Now, you need me. You've got three children about to live under this roof. You don't have a job, you haven't finished high school and you can't cook to save your life. You need me."

"So it's like some nanny McPhee type shit?"

"Sort of. I promised your mother than if she ever died, before you all got out of high school, I would help you all get through everything." Rosalinda said.

"She really loved us." I muttered more as a question.

"Unconditionally."

"I wish I could've told her thank you."

"I think she knew. I think she knew how much you loved her."

"A mother never knows how much a child loves them. How irrevocably hurt they are when they leave and how indescribably happy they are when they come back. Mothers will never know how much their children call out for them in dream lands when nightmares are around. They don't know how much they want them their for their first heartbreak or their second or their third. How the only thing I'd ever heard her say was 'keep your head up, no not in pride but in concern for the boy in the fire who was lost in the smoke.' They'll never know how much we miss those annoying rhymes that teach us to be better citizens. Her favorite was 'Excuses, tools of incompetence used to build monuments of nothingness.' And then I'd sit and ponder on what I'd call my monument. What I could name it. Something that would easily fall and crush that stupid saying. That stupid, important saying." I muttered tears running from the cells my eyes had created. I never understood missing someone until I missed someone I knew wasn't coming back. At least with Quinn there was a lock of hope. Just a sliver. A tiny one, but one no matter the size.