Desolate

Most remained here with me

I gave some to the wind                       

the wind that separated my toes

but something stayed    

crept     

poked 

inside

whispered

never mind the  

frost outside

inside is just as 

cold

What I'm currently working on...

So many times I’ve tried to remember that day, and I just can’t. I know I was young—not even quite five yet. But considering all that followed, I feel like I should remember. That it’s somehow wrong I don’t.

Not that I could have predicted the future, of course. And maybe it was the hysteria taking place around me that led to my memory wipeout, a kind of watered-down version of PTSD brought on by extreme external stress. Julia, the one responsible adult in my life, had spent days crying her eyes out and randomly hugging me. Then, on the morning in question, she answered the door to the man she equated with Satan and legged it to the kitchen, leaving me alone with the prince of darkness. Even Alex, the kind of kid who stuck his unwelcome nose in everyone's business, hid in his bedroom closet. With those nearest and dearest to me acting as if the Apocalypse had come early, I must have been terrified.

The man who inspired this borderline insane response was a 20-year-old college student named Bryan Jennings. He also happened to be my brother—or half-brother, to be precise. Before this meeting he’d been a fact I knew but couldn’t quite comprehend. We’d last seen each other a couple of years before, when I was a toddler, with the result that I couldn’t remember him. No one told me why he’d dropped out of my life, and I’d never asked. Even at my young age I already knew that family didn’t always stick around.

My present circumstances had proved that point. Julia wasn’t my mother. She wasn’t even my stepmother, at least not in the most technical sense of the word; her divorce from my father Hugo had come through a month before I was born. This is because Hugo had gotten frisky with the cleaning girl, and I was the unintended result. When Hugo confessed to Julia that he was about to become a father with another woman, she packed up their young son Alex and moved out. Although the affair clinched it, Julia was more than ready to call time on the marriage. The 25-year age gap between she and Hugo, not to mention his endless depression and drinking, had combined to make living with him a misery. Even if she didn’t want to admit it, she was relieved to have an excuse to leave.

Because I was living with my mother, Julia was able to pretend I didn’t exist. That all changed a year later, when Hugo called her up, drunk as a skunk, to announce that my mother had died in a car wreck and he was now my custodial parent. Suddenly I went from being the symbol of Hugo’s treachery to an object of pity, and then concern. Julia knew better than anyone that Hugo didn’t really want me. He hadn’t really wanted my mother, either—she’d just been a momentary escape from the reality he could barely tolerate. Julia was convinced he wouldn’t be the kind of father I needed, and she was right. He hired a live-in nanny and then continued to work horrendous hours at his fancy law firm, before he disappeared into his study every night with a bottle of whiskey.

Julia was horrified. She was also a divorced woman in her mid-30s who wanted another child. After a bit of soul searching, she made Hugo an offer he couldn’t refuse: if he allowed me to move in with her and Alex, she would absolve him of all paternal responsibility for me. It was a slam dunk for both of them. With me out of his hair Hugo could carry on with his self-destructive lifestyle guilt-free, while Julia in turn was gifted a daughter without having to put up with another useless man. I won, too. Maybe it was a weird arrangement, but it gave me something more closely resembling a family.

That was how things stayed for the next three years. And then Hugo died.