Sometimes, I think to be me is to be full of empty places. To fill a table with everyone who once loved me, then stopped.

Love soon meant the warmth of tears on my cheeks, the itch that came with the healing of skin cut and rubbed raw by the carpet in his bedroom. It meant a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, the unbearable knowledge that I had been irreparably changed.

the german’s heart. the local stoner’s heart. derek’s heart. so so many hearts. all stolen and trashed like fast food wrappers out a speeding car window. where are the keys to lock me up?

Isn’t that what we all want? Someone to come alongside us? Someone to fill the empty spaces in our stories? If we pay attention, our most vulnerable fellow humans are teaching us how to bear witness, how to join, how to show up.

or times when my sister would pretend we were french for who in their right mind wouldn’t want to be more neapolitan than the chocolate bottom on a triple-layer ice-cream stack

Is it possible my life story is entwined with his? That there is no coincidence? Might there be some form of "atonement" among various members of my family for this past? I expand my family history research. Could I or my relatives be making amends or reparations through "good works"?

I’ve told my therapist I will stop referring to myself as a series of holes, but still, it happens. He doesn’t laugh, only watches me with a mixture of pity and trepidation as I bray at his video icon on the skype call. It’s not hurtful if you laugh at yourself. It’s not sad. Look at how I’m laughing. See how much fun I’m having, talking this way.

It flips the pages until my cowering shadow bends and shifts in a slow motion cartoon moving from month to month until I am left in a knotted mess of sheets, missed calls and black out curtains.

But my grandmother did not outlive us all. In fact, she died when I was twelve, around the same time my sister left, and I don’t know if it was from one of her self-diagnosed maladies but there you have it – she was afraid of dying and, boom, she was dead. Which proved something. And I began to be afraid too.

Mother, I am wasting your life and want to give it back to you, but I’m not sure how.