Cleaning Up

When Cara opened her bedroom door, the box on the floor said it all. She moved on instinct to pick it up, but then she remembered there was no need. Her eyes filled and the water spilled over. She didn’t have to clean it up, so she dropped to the floor to cry.

Cara had been back at school for only two weeks. The semester was halfway done, but she couldn’t feel the end of it. Time was a desert.

Her teachers had lived enough of their lives to recognize the hollow mask of grief she couldn’t take off. They sympathized when she didn’t raise her hand in class. They accepted her homework late.

Very few of Cara’s friends could understand. They were her age, but they didn’t know what she knew. Some of them disappeared from her life, as if her loss would come after them too. Some of them stayed with her, bewildered, but fiercely at her side. Their desire to comfort her was genuine, but their empathy could only be theoretical. Cara pitied them for not understanding. Cara envied them for not understanding.

At 16, her routine had already worn down her life in a certain places and, because she’d mostly lost the ability to think, she followed where her actions had long been carved out.

Get off the bus. Walk in the door. Drop her backpack. Go in the kitchen. Make a peanut butter sandwich and a glass of chocolate milk. Make a second peanut butter sandwich, but do not eat it. Wait 30 minutes for her brother to come home. When he is safely in the door and has his sandwich and plain milk, go to her bedroom. Open the door. Check her room. There’s a pizza box on the floor from last night. Clean it up before Dad comes home.

Clean up before Dad comes home.

Clean up.