Cookie
I fold the pajama pants you gave her just before she turned six, just before you left. They're basically shorts now, hanging against her scuffed 9 year old knees, the matching top she passed down to her baby sister some months back. They've slowly stopped talking about you, the transformation from disbelief to anger to nothingness. I don't understand how people can just up and leave like that. Abandon children by the side of the road. I suppose that's what happens when the love runs out. We have mostly outgrown what you left us. I still wonder about you sometimes, in that way that I wonder what ever became of diet cherry coke. A bemusing by the side of the road as I wait for my own life to continue, you were never a parenthesis, though I know it would have been easier if you were. I hear that you're happy now, lord knows you were never happy here.