When I was sixteen, I watched my father pull out of our gravel driveway for a routine business trip to the coast. He leaned out of the window and called out to me with a wide, bright smile, “When I get back, Elara, we are finally taking that long weekend to tour the architecture academy in San Diego.”
He never made it home because a highway collision took his life before the sun had even set that evening.
In the weeks following the funeral, I expected my mother and me to cling to each other in our shared, suffocating grief. Instead, she moved with a cold and terrifying efficiency, scrubbing every trace of his presence from our home. She packed his life into cardboard boxes while talking incessantly about the necessity of a clean slate and a fresh start.
“I need to move forward, Elara, and you cannot stay stuck in the past if you want to survive this world,” she told me one afternoon while taping up a box of his favorite old wool sweaters.