TRIGGER WARNING
Quiet. The sound of the car wheels running away from the yellow lines sprayed onto the concrete highway of a thousand miles. The tick of a watch counts away the seconds of silence, of the dead between us all. The four of us sit upright, tight and strict and locked away and staring straight ahead.
Dad doesn't understand what's happening, stealing glances at Mum and escaping my eyes in the mirror. Mum focuses on the road, her eyes like steel, like the yellow lines running under the car wheels with blurred colors and worn away spots like missing pieces to a puzzle. Tyde stares at his hands, like they're still caked with blood, like the lines spanning across his palm held the mysteries and the possibilities and the made-up futures that we and Sage and Steele used to read from them.
I don't understand how we were able to play like that, how we could see futures in the palms of our hands, how we could see magic in the trees and fairies in the rivers and the swinging tire by the edge of the lake was the way into a magical land that only we could get to. How we could scratch our names into little wooden houses and call them the coat of arms on castle walls, how we could splash around in little pools and throw airplanes that cut through the cheerful air of living rooms at Thanksgiving, happy to be with family. How we could hope. How we could be happy with these cousins and their confusion, with these aunts and their paranoia, with these uncles and their pride, with these grandmothers and their terror.
Because family only ruins every image I thought I had of normal, I thought I was okay, and all that family and stupid little cousins do is ruin that. Thanksgiving isn't about being thankful I'm alive anymore, it's about wishing that I wasn't. It's about why Tyde's fingernails have spots of blood on them and his wrists have new scars that I've never noticed before, about how his forehead is covered in scratches because the pain keeps it real, it tells us that this is real life. Because you don't feel the pain of fingernails digging into skin in dreams, and you don't feel the pain of listening to stupid cousins reduce the boy who used to be the only star in the sky to a gun and bright hair.
Thinking about it, I almost wish that instead of failing at being quiet I had just slit the wrists of hands that should've died with the only one who had ever kissed them. I still could, couldn't I?