What Loving You Felt Like

In the car, backseat. I sat on the left side of the car, back when there was no other side. I sat and watched her, watched her breathe, watched her alive. Watched the jagged lines on her arm, winding their way through her stick and pokes. She had one for Chase.

Chase never saw much of Perry. Her half-brother was all the way in Peoria, Arizona, all 2576 miles away. He was 9, all the way in Peoria, Arizona, and she was 19, all the way in Hartford, Connecticut. So I guess she kept him there, on the side of her arm, in little constellations of ink messily scattered about. I don’t remember seeing many lines over that one.

I remember Connecticut, that damned state. It was cold and small and nothing mattered. Except for Granny. An old, Italian woman, so fragile yet so very strong. She couldn’t have been over 4’11, and I quickly grew to be much taller than her. It didn’t matter. She’d fuss over me just the same, make sure I ate all my pasta and pizzelles, make sure I didn’t ‘look like a boy,’ or anything of the sort. I remember being there with Perry, I remember pictures framed carefully upon the console table. The drawer beneath hid many more just like it, ones Granny didn’t have space for. Or the frames for, for that matter. Perry and Mom ruffled through this drawer, latching onto shared memories with each worn picture they stumbled across. She searched for anything that mattered, something more than that tattoo on her arm. I remember the look on her face when she found an old picture of Chase. She had turned it over to read something scribbled on the back in old handwriting. Her brows knit into a disbelief as she tugged it towards her chest. Maybe that would help her heart believe it a little more. My little eyes had never seen her make that face before. I’d never see that expression again.

“I can send him presents,” she had whispered softly. As if she couldn’t believe it herself, as if that was the only thing that could possibly matter.

It was his address. I was 10. I couldn’t imagine how something so small could mean so much. And I couldn’t imagine how a mother in Peoria, Arizona could ever leave her daughter to find her address through a creased picture in her great-grandmother’s console drawer.

I did my own ruffling through the console drawer recently. I don’t have much left of her. It’s hard for me to remember her voice, what she looked like, what her smile was like. Not that I saw much of that. I remember her short breaths, her anxious eyes. She was always so scared. I never knew why. So I found her Facebook. It all dates to a short period from 2017, when she was dating a guy named William Prentiss. She was 18 at the time. He didn’t look 18. He had 2 kids and a scruffy beard, was a scare actor with too much makeup and spikey hair. He played playstation and posted about his kids a lot. He said the n-word a few times in his posts. Honestly, he looked like typical Connecticut trash, not that I’m one to judge. But I guess I have something to thank Connecticut Trash for: the one video I have left of her came from that profile. A short video from November 15th, 2017, of her laughing with his two kids. Soran and Phoenix, I think. She sounded so happy. She was my age.

In the car, backseat. I studied those lines on her arm. I wondered what they were. Some were angry, raised and discolored, near her shoulder. They grew thin as her arm did. No amount of ink could cover that up, although she may have tried. I asked Mom what they were. I wonder how she felt when I asked that question. I certainly saw it on her face. I don’t even remember how she answered, probably not directly, but you never need that, really. You can always tell. You can always tell when you’re young and you ask a hard question. You can always feel the falter in the air, that brief second of impact that they prepared for, but forgot that nothing can really make them ready. You feel the wallowing of the feeling and how to say it, how it will hurt, even if you don’t know it yourself. I felt my mom hurt. It’s enough for a kid to understand. It left a pit in my stomach.

I wonder if she ever thought I would look differently at her after that. I never did. I would just look at something I could never understand back then, a world I’d never be a part of, never see until I grew old.

I grew into it. I took after her. Dyed my hair and got piercings, smudged eye shadow on my face, wore all black. She started texting me more. Asking if I wanted to get piercings with her. Giving me hair dye brands. Bonding over what we couldn’t tell my mom, bonding over being the ‘gay cousins.’ She told me she got a dog and asked what she should name it. We decided on Leif. It was one of the last pictures I had of her, of her and that dog. She had gained weight from the medication she was on, cut her hair short. She was just as beautiful, even if she didn’t feel it. Not that I would know. That year, she drove down for a Thanksgiving in Maryland. It was 2021, a brisk November. How Thanksgiving should feel, one of the best Thanksgiving’s I’d ever had. I had walked to Pepperjack’s Subs with her. It’s just down the road. I worked there when I was 14. Chipped wooden floors, always playing country music. I was 16, old enough to hang out and old enough to understand. She was 22. We talked over milkshakes and fries about weed, about music, about hair; I told her about all the tattoos and piercings I would get when my parents couldn’t control me anymore. I have those piercings now. Still working on the tats.

All my friends were just like us, some more scarred than others. I was definitely one of the lucky ones. But at least I knew, at least I “got it.” As much as someone like me could’ve, I guess. She never got the chances I did. Mom was more like one to her than her own mother ever was and she moved as far as she could get away from Peoria, Arizona as soon as she could. That was with her dad in Connecticut, not that he was much better. Sure, she got to work with him in his vet office; it had always been her dream. She loved animals to death. But he also left his drug addiction lying around the house. She was 16.

When I was that age, Perry went into rehab. It was shortly after her visit on Thanksgiving. I think she spent her 23rd birthday there. My last memory of her was in January, soon after she was released, when she texted me out of the blue asking for a tarot reading and told me to just let the cards fly out. I did. I told her (adamantly, as most of my readings go) that something needed to change. She knew it, too; the seed had already been planted. Some kind of big shift in her life was coming, a change in her career, most likely. Whatever sign she was looking for, this was the one. She told me excitedly that she finally, after all these years, knew what she wanted to do. It was never with animals or being a veterinarian like her dad, but instead with social work. She wanted to help people struggling with the same addiction she struggled with. She wanted to get a degree for the first time. She wanted to get better. She finally had a dream.

It was January 17th, 2022, two weeks later. I was with the girl I had been dating at the time, just chilling in her bed. A normal Monday night. I get a call from my dad. He’s coming to pick me up.

The car door slams shut, leaving a ringing silence between us in his pickup truck. I wish the silence had stuck. It was January 17th, 2022. Perry overdosed.

Her dream was shattered before it even began. She was going to get better. She was going to help people get better. But she was gone. It wasn’t fair.

I blamed Sharie, her mom. I blamed her for keeping her away from Chase, I blamed her for the scars, the addiction, the terrible childhood, the anxiety, all of it. Her dad wasn’t around to answer for it anymore. He had died the same way the year before.

I was in the car, backseat. I sat on the left side of the car, back when there was no other side. Sharie sat on that side. My family had already left, slammed the doors shut, left a ringing silence between us in the SUV. “Please don’t hate me.” Desperate words from a desperate woman, I suppose. A grieving one. I assured her I didn’t, avoiding her knitted brows all the while. I lied through my teeth. “I can send him presents” was all I could remember. I liked Perry’s knitted brows more.

18/3/25