Dirt

5

Knox

There's only been so much behind me in life. When I was young, really young, it was my Dad. When he was gone my mom filled the role for years after. She tried to make our new life in South Carolina as well as it could be when all we could think about was where Dad went. That's where I first found it, piano lessons after school every Monday and Thursday. Mom was musical too, she would sing through the house and encouraged us to play whatever our heart pulled towards. But then all the shit left hit the fan too. No matter how much I trusted friends, teachers, neighbors, they were gone after a couple of months if mom started it all up again to the point we couldn't hide it. 

There was only Grace and I. The only exception was melodies and lyrics and emotion. Nights when we didn't know where mom really was I would play the old battery radio that played only a certain number of stations. When we were home and Mom was too, with her own very guest, I put headphones into the cheap phone had bought me for my eleventh birthday so Grace could listen to classical music as loud as possible. I'd leave the scratchy oldies station up really loud of me with hopes of finding an extra blanket in the lyrics.

It was those nights, music class every other day, afternoons at Boys and Girls club, or on the weekends in my friend's bedrooms that resonated in something that could always be behind me.

It gave us futures, Grace and me teaching each other instruments, she found her love for teaching the other kids at the boys and girls club until she settled in the idea of teaching music one day. I still lull myself asleep to eminem or John Lennon on my minute-pay phone and the dream of someone singing a song I wrote. It was a connection to the mother we were suddenly loosing.

It's the only stability since Mom got herself caught and served time in, when the state did as much digging as possible to find Kelly and Tim and deemed them perfect biological grandparents to ship us off to. All the family info stapled in a nice packet Grace and I read over as Mom was read the rule of the inside. The phone calls and the packed clothes only important when Kelly swore to get us into all the music classes she could once she heard our 'hobbies'. 

The mind-boggling idea of sharing a room with my uncle barely deterred by Tim promising to buy a keyboard for us to use since they had gotten rid of the small piano my mom used to play. The piano is one of my favorite instruments and I've never had one, but again I would be living with a family I didn't know, in a place I didn't know, weeks before my senior year, and sharing a room with my motherfucking uncle.

And so I down myself in lyrics and keys. Grace, bless her heart, was hesitant yet still find her nervous voice to answer some of the overbearing questions at the dinner table. She wasn't mad at that bitch Roger's comments of overtaking his life, or how he gave us the harshest glares he could when Kelly bothered him to do something else for the two of us. 

Grace smiled at the fresh blankets on her bed and offers to go to the town over to get her own clothes with school supplies. She awed and hopped on her toes as she ran her fingers over the brand-fucking-new keyboard for us they placed in her room. And she smiled into full plates of home-cooked food. 

I love my sister, I've done everything to protect her as much as I can even if I couldn't, but seeing Grace so...happy her doesn't feel right. Why could push past everything going on with mom or the idea that we're living with strangers all over again and this time I can't be Grace's life. She has to make a whole new one here, we both do I guess, and I should be happy that she is finding a way to be happy. 

But I'm absolutely not, if my playlists (on the brand new phones Kelly and Tim insisted on getting us so 'they can always be able to contact' us) didn't say anything. I'm playing the angriest, rawest songs I could remember on the keyboard -graced by the notion of plugging in headphones so only I could hear it. Although, Grace could tell I wasn't playing Rocket Man.