#sorry not sorry if the text didn't get small i'm working on a chromebook lol.

[exitiumparit]

hold @ val

@coolleatherjacket || send ‘hold’ to hug my muse during a difficult time || selectively accepting

“I can’t go in there right now.”

Her voice is hard to listen to in her own ears. It’s dry and hoarse and her eyes are still red and itchy from crying and crying and crying because her mom is dead. 

It was just an ordinary afternoon that turned into a worrying afternoon that turned into some sort of late night hour where all of a sudden her favorite person in the world….wasn’t there. 

Her dad took her home and they are sitting in his old and rusted truck, staring at the house. Their house. No, it was her house more than it was his, because he was never fucking there. But, he’s here now. And she’s sitting in his truck.

And she can’t go inside and see her mom’s stuff and look at her mom’s room and think about how they were supposed to go have a day trip on Saturday to the beach and–

“Okay.”

Her dad cannot deal with much, but he’s enough of an idiot to know how to run, so he does.

He backs out of the driveway and heads out of Maple Bay, and she’s thankful, but her hands are still shaking. Because she’d spent hours alone in the hospital. Because her mom had gotten in a car accident. Because she was dead. It’s something achingly true and achingly unable to be real. She can’t conceptualize not going to the beach with her mom, and not coming home and hearing 80s music blasting through the house, or ever hearing her and her dad fight and–

Some amount of time later that passes in more of a blur than she can process, he parks in the woods. She gets out, practically throws herself out of the car. Cars are evil. Cars killed her mom.;

Her mom.

She’s eighteen.

Fuck, this sucks.

She continues to walk away from the truck, forces herself to continue to put distance between herself and anything that associates itself with her mother. So she takes her long legs through the trees and the noise of her dad behind her is something she can recognize but she forces it out, because hey, if she walks long enough, she might walk into a world where her mom is alive.

A vine catches her sneaker clad foot and she tumbles. Her dad calls her name, because she can barely hear it, because she’s crying so hard she can barely hear her own thoughts.

He wraps his arms around her on the ground. He hugs her close and he smells like cigarette smoke and old leather and wood polish and how is there something of Mom’s perfume if he’s never around?

She hates him. Resents him. He abandoned her and he abandoned her mom and he’s the last person left in the world of her family.

But, he’s her dad and he’s the one who would move branches for her old photographs and carry her out of the truck when she fell asleep on the drives home and told her scary stories and told her to paint or photograph whatever the fuck she wanted. There’s a part of him, a memory of him, that’s a good father. It’s the memory of that past that she lets comfort her.