I studied the card in the dim light of the passing countryside, tears stinging my eyes. I had no idea what any of this was, and I didn’t want to know. All I knew was that I had lost enough and wanted no part of whatever this card had or might still represent.

So I rolled down the window and let the rushing air take it away. I hope it is never found, but if it is, let it be far away from me.

I found a dead bird in the mailbox

Being alone is hard. When I was eleven and my parents split up, I felt really alone for the first time. My world was suddenly so different than it had been just the day before. My parents had been my best friends, and they were supposed to be best friends with each other too. When they told me they were getting a divorce, I just listened and tried not to react. Half my friends at school didn’t have both parents either, and I needed to act mature about it.

But inside, I was screaming.

If they weren’t really best friends with each other, then they probably weren’t best friends with me. And when I saw how they were looking at each other—my father red-eyed and so tired looking, my mother’s face stony except for lips she kept pursing like she tasted something bitter—I saw them for the first time not as parents, but as people. And it terrified me.

In the six months after that, I spent time with both of them, but it was always awkward. I felt like I was engaged in some kind of clumsy, terrible dance with both of them all the time. Don’t say the wrong thing, don’t mention the other one, don’t act like you like something too little or too much. We were all walking on eggshells made of glass, and each misstep left a scar on someone.

That’s why I understood when my father said he was taking a contract job in Australia for a year. I was going to miss him, but honestly the main thing I felt was relief. We all needed a break from whatever our family had become, and my hope was that when he came back, things would be better somehow.

Except he never did come back. He had been there just over a month when we got word that he had been killed in some kind of accident. I never knew more about it other than that we had to bury an empty coffin. My mother might have known more, but she was crying all the time for the first couple of months after he died, and after that it just didn’t seem worth bringing back up just to upset her all over again.