how to ruin a daughter

anyone who's ever known me when i'm in love knows how completely fucked up i can be. i have a habit of wanting love more than anything in the world and then having absolutely no idea what to do with it when it's mine.

the first heartbreak i ever experienced wasn't even mine. it belonged to my parents.

my parents fell in love when they were quite young. they ran away from home together, and somewhere along the way, my mother got pregnant with me. they never got married, but they had me. and for a while, they tried to build a life together.

she left him when i was eight. they loved each other very much, but they were terribly toxic for each other, and love wasn't enough to keep them together.

my mother eventually moved on with her life. my father never really did.

but here's something i don't think i'll ever forget: from the day she left until the day he died, my father kept everything she'd left behind in the house we once shared, exactly as she'd left it. her clothes, her makeup, and all those little things that belonged to a woman who no longer lived there. he never put any of it away.

i grew up in a house haunted by my mother who is still very much alive. i was too young to understand what it meant back then. i just knew that, for some reason, my father couldn't bring himself to move her things.

for eight years, he lived among her things. i don't know whether he was still waiting for her to come back, or whether putting them away would have meant accepting that she never would.

and i think that's the saddest part of being their only daughter. i grew up learning that you can love someone with everything you have and still have to live the rest of your life without them.

and sometimes i wonder if i've become the very house i grew up in. full of things that belong to people who aren't coming back.