Content note Mentions parental divorce and family conflict.
I had two toothbrushes, two pillows, two different ways of saying goodnight.
At my father’s, the radio. At my mother’s, the long silence after the light.
Every Friday the car smelled of my bag and their carefulness.
Neither of them asked the questions they wanted to ask.
I learned to carry messages folded small inside my mouth.
Tell your mother. Tell your father. I told the window instead.
Somewhere on that road between them I lost a blue jumper,
a library book, a whole year of believing things would go back.
At my mother’s house the photographs had gaps like pulled teeth.
At my father’s, there were no photographs at all.
I became good at being two daughters — one quiet, one cheerful.
I am thirty-one and still not sure which one was me.
Now they are older and softer, and they ask about each other,
casually, the way you might ask about the weather in a city you left.
Last Christmas, by accident, they were both in my kitchen.
They stood by the kettle and talked about my childhood, kindly.
I washed dishes with my back to them so they wouldn’t see my face.
I had been waiting twenty years for one room to hold all of us.
It lasted eleven minutes. It was enough.
It was not enough. It was, at last, a beginning.
