Silent Solitude

Chapter 12

Shopping was therapeutic on its own but especially hungover.

Coffee in hand, Charlie's yellow lighter, and a pack of cigarettes weighing down my pocket, my mother, Jacob, and I walked around one of the few shopping outlets near our neighborhood.

We were all here for different things.

Jacob: a new basketball and another pair of sneakers he'd grow out of in a matter of months.

My mother: perfume and some quality time with her favorite son and least favorite daughter.

Me: a good ice cream cone and somewhere quiet to smoke.

We walked around, going into whatever stores caught my little brother's eye and walking out empty-handed just a minute later. After eight failed shops, he finally found a familiar store from which to buy his sneakers.

A fucking Nike store we'd passed at least twice.

"What do you think of these Jo?" he asked, holding up two sneakers that genuinely looked identical.

Just to please him, I pointed to the one on the left. "That one's better."

But for the life of me, I couldn't spot a single difference.

"Jake, don't you have that exact pair at home?" my mother asked as she examined a pair that looked just like the other two in Jacob's hands. He rolled his eyes, unimpressed with us both.

"No. The one at home has white soles, these are navy."

I could hear the sigh in his voice.

Squinting, I tried to picture the pair he already owned. "But isn't the sole covered anyway...like, you can't even see them when you wear the shoes."

He let out the sigh he'd obviously been withholding. "Forget it, I'll just get these," he held on the ones on the left. My mother shrugged, just happy to leave the shoe store and pay.

Neither of us had addressed our argument. As usual, we just moved passed it and pretended as if it hadn't happened. She had always been better at that than I had.

It made my head hurt, conflicted between the emotions I felt. My parents loved me, there was no doubt about it. I had had a good childhood until I hadn't, I'd gotten everything I'd wanted until I hadn't, and my mother had never raised a hand towards me until she had. I wasn't sure how I was meant to feel. A teenage girl who knew she was loved by parents who made her feel unlovable.

It was like a switch that had flickered on overnight, a sudden shift in the family. The feeling of guilt that I felt for hating my parents, even going as far as to wish them dead on days when nothing but anger resided in my head. I couldn't forget the days when my mother had felt like my best friend, the person I wouldn't have been able to tell all my secrets to. It was only when she hadn't believed the biggest one I'd ever spoken aloud, that something clicked, and I'd felt the emotion leave my body with nothing but hatred.

The line between remorse, sadness, nostalgia, and anger was blurred. Each feeling held a part of my soul in tendrils of heartache, pulling me in every direction until I was stretched to the point of exhaustion. I was suspended in the air by nothing but a thin rope that hung from nothing. There was no secure base or foundation that ensured the rope wouldn't snap, it was only a matter of waiting, to see how I would fall whether my feet would reunite with the ground or flail until I withered away in a void of nothing forever, a chasm so deep that the end was never in sight.

My mother was an asteroid, streaking through the sky and stealing the brightness from the stars for a mere second. The damage had been done, the dullness was permanent after that.