I want to make things better between us but I don’t know how

How do we repair what we both are responsible for breaking? I’m trying to write things that astonish me each day

Photo by Daiga Ellaby on Unsplash

What do you do when you’re supposed to be working fifty hours a week and find yourself staring at a day on call, which morphs into a free day? What can you do when the weekend is yours when normally it’s for those who pay to relax at your expert hands?

I’m astonished not to know how to make coffee without it being a cold brew I bought at Trader Joe’s.

I smile as I remember my father making coffee years before the sun ever yawned his first breath of light into the living room. How he shuffled about, and the kitchen light would bleed through my door depending on where we lived. How I hid from him and kept my lights off to type by the glow of my laptop to all my internet friends I was making at fifteen, my parents didn’t know, but kind of still did.

Astonishment presents itself when I realize what I’ve been doing wrong with making my coffee and trying to use a milk frother. The milk needs to be hot and steamed before the pulsations make it swell twice its size in the snow bear cup I’m using to hold it.

I find little hills of joy in talking to a friend I’ve never met, but I can feel and hear the smile in her voice when we talk poetry together.

I think of all the people I connected so well within chat rooms as a teenager in the 90s and today as an adult twenty years later.

It astonishes me to say it’s been twenty years since I hid from my dad as he shuffled to get ready for his morning shift before even the Robins dared to sing.

I make two cups of coffee because the first is terrible, and I wonder how whenever my parents make me coffee, it tastes so good in their tiny home they now have.

It astonishes me to see how adept my mother is at decorating things and how I love every thoughtful little knick-knack she’s cultivated to make it home. Her mother stares at me from one of the shelves. She’s regal, stunning, and so beautiful. I don’t know of any person more gorgeous than how she looks in that photo. I see my mother as that same beauty no matter how time passes.

Regal, trying to be in style, always making sure a face is perfect, primed with makeup as a secret ritual she never skips, and I never got how to do.

It is a wonder to meet their dog and have her be a sleeping mound of peace once she gets home and I’m ready to leave.

I want to say don’t forget me when I left my parents a week and one day ago today. I want to say invite me back. I want to say I love you, but I’m learning how we say it in a language we both get without hurt. I want to say. Please don’t stop loving me, this person I am right now, not just the little girl you thought you knew so well. I want to say I’ll make things better, but I don’t know how.