Total pages in book: 39
Estimated words: 37164 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 186(@200wpm)___ 149(@250wpm)___ 124(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 37164 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 186(@200wpm)___ 149(@250wpm)___ 124(@300wpm)
Boxes line the walls, stacked neatly and unapologetically, as if they know exactly what they’re holding and are waiting for me to be brave enough to remember it too. Aunt Carol has been thorough. The practical things are already gone, furniture wrapped, drawers emptied, and closets thinned to hangers and dust.
What’s left is intentional. It’s left for me.
I move toward the dining room first, drawn to the smaller pile set off to the side. I kneel on the floor and lift the lid of the top box.
Paper. So much paper.
Cards, folded and refolded until the creases are soft. Programs from events I don’t even remember attending. Notes written in my mother’s looping handwriting with everything from reminders, to recipes, to lists of things she meant to do and probably never did.
I pick one up at random.
Savy,
Don’t forget to call the electrician.
Love you.
She always signed everything like that. As if love needed to be named out loud or it might slip away.
I set the note aside and reach deeper into the box. A stack of notebooks comes next. Her notebooks. The covers are worn, the corners are worn away completely. I know better than to open them yet. Some things feel too much like trespassing, even now.
The second box is heavier, packed to the brim with photo albums. The old kind, with thick plastic pages that crackle when you turn them and get caught on the middle rings. I sit back on my heels and open the first one.
There I am at six, missing two front teeth, holding a doll I don’t remember asking for. There’s my mom behind the camera, reflected faintly in the glass of a window, smiling like she already knows how fast this goes.
I flip the page.
The day I left this town with my car packed too full, and my mom standing in the driveway with her arms crossed like she was bracing herself against something invisible.
I close the album.
The ache spreads slow and deep, the kind that doesn’t knock you over but never really lets you stand straight again.
The kitchen is worse.
Her mug is still by the sink, where I left it earlier, where Aunt Carol must have been using it to hydrate through all of her own sense of loss after losing her sister. The sight of it hits me again like grief is learning new angles against my defences. I pick it up this time, turning it in my hands. The chip catches my thumb.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper, though I don’t know what for. Everything, maybe. Anything.
I move through the house room by room, touching things lightly, like the back of a chair, the edge of the counter, the doorframe where my height is still penciled in from years ago.
Each mark feels like proof of life. Each one feels like a goodbye.
In the hallway, I stop outside my childhood bedroom. I tell myself I don’t have to go in but I know I must. Shadows can only stay in the dark for so long until they come into the light. I open the door.
The room is stripped down to its bones. The bed gone. The posters peeled off the walls. What’s left is the faint outline of who I used to be in this house with nail holes, and a pale square where a bulletin board once hung.
On the floor sits many boxes but one stands out.
Sav.
Just my name.
My hands shake as I lift the lid.
Inside are things I recognize instantly and things I forgot ever existed like concert tickets, old journals, and a scarf I thought I lost years ago. On top of it all is a folded piece of paper with my handwriting.
Things I’ll come back for.
I sink down onto the floor, the motion clumsy and ungraceful, like my body gives up before my pride does.
I never did. I never came back.
The truth lands slowly, cruel in its patience. I didn’t come back for the holidays or the things that mattered. I left, and I kept leaving, convincing myself that distance was the same as survival.
The house creaks around me, familiar and foreign all at once, like it’s clearing its throat. I press my palm to the floor, the wood cool beneath my skin, and breathe until the room stops tilting.
Tomorrow, this place won’t be mine. Tomorrow the boxes will be gone, and the rooms emptied of proof that we ever lived here the way we did.
Tonight the house still knows me. So I sit there, right in the middle of everything I avoided. The half-packed boxes. The memories stacked too close together. The grief I kept telling myself I’d deal with later. I let it all spill in at once, messy and wildly unfair.
It hurts but it also feels important and honest.
I stop trying to outrun the breaking and let myself feel it with a knowing some things don’t shatter you all at once. They wear you down quietly, over years.