Blurb - Texture
A four part memoir blast about the years when I was too young to carry what I carried, and too old to be protected from any of it. These are the shards: the overwhelm, the rescue missions, the masks, and the borrowed families that held me together when I didn’t know how to hold myself.
Water, Mud,
Sunshine, and the Scales in Your Head
It
didn’t need anything complicated. Just water and mud and sunshine
and five minutes of care — which I was always good at. So while I
was there, I cleaned up all the gravestones. Every single one. I
picked the weeds, brushed the dirt off the stones, read the names,
got overwhelmed by them, felt sorry for the children who had been
forgotten.
I even stole flowers from the nice graves and stones from the nice graves and swapped things around so the forgotten ones had something. And then, when I was leaving, the guilt hit me like it always did. The imbalance in my head. The scales I’ve always had.
I felt terrible for taking things from other people’s graves, because those people were sad too. And then I realised the reason these children’s graves were left unattended was probably because the parents couldn’t come anymore, or couldn’t bear to come, or were too sad to come.
So on one hand I had done a kind thing. And on the other hand I had taken something from someone else’s sadness.
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