Tonya’s pretty face and rabbit teeth stared back at us, which made me cry even more. There we were, the four of us, on one of the happiest days of my childhood.

Mama freed the photo from its plastic sleeve and handed it to me. I’d take it home and frame it, and eventually, that image of my friend would take the place of the one that Stacia wrote about in her journal.

The next picture that Mama flipped to was one of me and my Meechie. We’re really small. I’m maybe three or four years old, and he’s about eight.

I’m holding a slice of cake in my right palm. Apparently, I will bring the hand up to my mouth and take bites. No one will stop me, tell me that it is unladylike. In the picture, my brother will call me adorable with his eyes.

I am grateful, to this day, that he, unlike many of Stacia’s siblings, has his life. It’s still a tough one, populated with ghosts that I can’t see, and ones that he doesn’t know how to exorcise, but he is still with us.

On holidays, like magnets, we are drawn to Mama’s house, no matter the state of his misery or intoxication and no matter how hard I have to fight to leave my congregation in California. We give each other and our mama that promise, to return home, to look each other in the eye.

After the summer he went away, he formed lifelong allegiances that kept him safer in jail and employed in street life once he was released. The man who shows up on holidays resembles my brother, and sometimes can access the emotion and memory of who he once was, but mostly, he is the man he decided to become so that he could stay alive.

On Christmas one year, we notice that Mama had enlarged and framed a photo of us. I can only stare at these children, because they look like us, but it’s so hard to connect to their innocence after all that we’ve been through.

I’m wearing a yellow sundress with spaghetti straps; Meechie’s in a short set. I’m five, he’s nine, and we’re pressed back-to-back, arms folded across our chests, grinning the way kids do, before someone tells them that the look is too goofy, that expressing happiness so unfiltered makes them look weak. This picture documents the last few seasons that my brother and I are children. It takes us back to before we are injured; before the demolition of all the structures that held us in place.