There was a handsome young man from Missouri whose photograph filled the newspapers in the aftermath of the fire. He became the face of survival and hope in the wake of so much grief. No human had ever been burned so badly and lived. Everyone, even the young man, asked how he had survived. He, himself, asked why. He wanted to die at times, and perhaps if he’d been able to walk, he might’ve just done that, flown from a window when no one was looking, like another young man had done when he could not live with his wife’s death and the thought that he could have done more to find her that night. But the young man from Missouri lived, and after months and months of trials and failures, he rose from his bed and walked. And then he fell in love and got married and eventually returned to his beloved home in Missouri, only to be in a freak car accident 10 years later, pinned and waiting for help, when a gas leak engulfed him in flames. So, what does that even mean? Did some great soul out there simply delay fate so he could experience love and some happiness in his brief life? Did someone out there say, “Please, he’s just a boy.”

November 2015
Southern Pines

Sometimes, I wake thinking I am in my childhood bed. There is ice on the window, a hairline crack in the glass ceiling light. Home is that childhood bed on School Street, and home is Grove Street, where you grew up, and now home is here with your father, here in this humid world where I feel I live in a terrarium, a can of oxygen trailing me like an obedient dog.

I don’t look like that girl on School Street, but I am still her.

I miss Grove Street. I miss the radiators, and the large mirror plastered into the wall. I miss the marks we left on the pantry door, measuring your heights over the years, the smudge on the wall I could never clean, where Rudolf curled each night. I miss going to Mount Feake, where my parents are buried, there on the river, there within sight of the building where my father worked his whole adult life. They are there side by side, as if nothing ever happened, and who would even know their story if I didn’t tell it? Perhaps sometime you will go and visit them.