I need some room to breathThere's nothing better than waking up to hear the first Foo Fighters song I've liked in a decade. It's called Run and it's really good. Not since The Pretender in 2007 has one of their songs hooked me from the first chorus like that.
You can stay asleep if you wanted to
They say that's nothings free
You can run with me if you wanted to
Yeah you can run with me if you wanted to
***
Sam is a song I can't hear, playing softly on the radio on the kitchen counter by the open window where a warm midmorning summer breeze lifts the curtains just enough to let the memory thief slip between them, straight back into my head.
What about the letters, Bridget?
He's codependent, enabling, needing me to need him and today I don't need anyone.
You read them.
I have.
Great. You can do me a book report. Like in grade five when I did one on The Great Brain and by the end I realized it was a book about Lochlan.
That's funny but that's changing the subject.
You're fucking gaslighting me, Sam.
August has you in a good spot, then. Sam concedes, backing off as I think about precisely the spot August had me in last time I saw him, wedged up against the door under his hands, my head pressed against the night latch. I think I have a dent in my temple from it, truth be told, and I reach up to rub it while Sam remains oblivious.
I'll keep them for you. Someday you may change your mind. I'm just trying to keep your best interests at heart.
God. He fits in here so nicely. So well, as they all get along like brothers, barely breaking the mold of their teenage years which came to mean passing me around like a bottle of forbidden alcohol, risking a sip here, a swallow there, hiding me away, bringing me out to fight over, angry young drunks with a bone to pick, when mine were clean and so easily plucked, bent like bows to shoot arrows through all of them until I had a stack of hearts a mile long, my arrow so weighed down it headed in the wrong direction, taking me so long to get back here I arrive bitter, tired and suspicious, resentful as hell.
(I didn't mean to write all that today but there it is.)
I reach out and turn the radio off and close the window and the silence that echoes back to me is deafening.