Days are getting bleaker as time passes by & I’m starting to believe the sun disappeared with my son & with you. This spring was a blur of marijuana and Skol vodka and the desire to be held in your arms. Do you remember the nights we spent on your back porch, chain-smoking and whispering words of reassurance because I was strung out on off-brand antidepressants and you were fiending for your fix of anything that would rid your mind of your dad rotting in prison or the lines of cocaine your mother would do after too many drinks? Or the mornings we would all gather on the porch for coffee and squares, staring at the sky in the noisy morning silence of the trailer park? I remember and often I wish I didn’t. I have secrets from those times that I have buried deep within me. I know what you did last spring.

Two lines appeared on the dollar store pregnancy test and suddenly, you were no longer a freshman in high school and I was no longer one body, but two. Where your eyes used to search mine for the answers to all our problems, they now stared at me coldly, because your childhood was gone, and soon you would be too. And all I could think of was the baby inside me, praying you would stick around for him, if not for me. I knew we were both still children, I knew this would never work, but I never once gave up on you. I never once gave in to the doubt. I watched you walk out my front door and I kept telling myself you would come back. After three days, after waiting with my hands shaking and dark circles under my eyes, I latched the door. I couldn’t keep letting the cold in.

I’ve been trying to forget the day that they told me our son was dead, I’ve been trying to blow away the smoke from the cigarette I had ten minutes after. I’ve been burying the night that our son left my body and where I had been one whole person before, I was now barely a person at all. I’ve done all I can to forget the phone call I had to make to you, and the nonchalant reply you gave when you should have been devastated because he was your son and now he was dead. But your voice replays itself in my mind every time I drink too much and lately that’s all the time.

Summer was another blur. It was a blur of vodka coffee and cigarettes on the balcony, tears streaming down my face and the rapid beat of my heart from the unreasonable amount of amphetamines I consumed to feel something, anything, again. Summer was a lot of asking myself why; why did you leave, why did our son die, why was I here. I try not to revisit those days. I am no longer that girl, there’s no vodka in my coffee anymore.

I met a man with strong hands and an addicting voice like you. He’s never used either one to hurt me, & I guess that’s where you two are different. There are still mornings I wake up to make you breakfast and get hit with the realization that you’re not here. But this morning, he woke up to make me bacon and eggs and that’s something you never did. I still miss the morning sunrises and the whispers in the dark, but I don’t miss walking on eggshells, and I don’t miss the taste of L&M Turkish Blends on your lips.

Every time I hold the sneakers you bought for our son, your face appears vibrantly in my mind. It takes a lot to feel alive nowadays, it takes a strip of sleeping pills or a couple shots of Jack to the dome. But ever since you left, I am learning to survive instead of just to exist and that’s how I know things have gotten better. I never wake up to an empty bed with rumpled sheets anymore. He stays until my eyes open.

I learned a lot when I loved you. You brought so much good, and so much bad, and you evoked so many feelings that I never had the chance to process. You taught me how to lose someone, but he’s teaching me how to love someone, and you wouldn’t know anything about that.