I went home, inside me an emptiness the size of the backpack I’d borrowed from my mother. Since I needed to find a reason for the emptiness, I blamed the amount owing that I hadn’t collected. I’d crossed half the country to recover it and had come back empty-handed. I was a failure. One hiding a second failure, which I still didn’t know what to call.
I went back to my routine: school, dogs, my mother, my new father, my sister.
The others. In a couple of weeks, they’d grown a few centimeters and I’d shrunk a few. They didn’t seem to notice, but I did. And in those brief moments of awareness, the only solution was to make the most of any excuse to hug my sister or my mother.
I didn’t want to disappear. And to stop that from happening, I had to cling to Planet Earth.