"To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”? Oscar Wilde

I was nine-years-old the last time I saw my mother. It was 21:31. I was supposed to be in bed by then, but how could you sleep through that? Dragging Teddy down with me by his worn-out paw, I tip toed cautiously down the bare wooden stairs. Silent, unseen like a thief lurking in shadows of the night. Maybe she heard the pine creaking beneath my toes, or maybe she just knew, but either way she turned, her hand clenched around the keys to the car. I could see the distance in her eyes, the thick streaks of mascara running down her porcelain skin, hear the lifelessness in her voice. She was drowning. I asked her where she was going, when she’d be back. And, to be honest, I don’t know what she told me, if she said that she loved me, if she’d be back. But what I do know is that it kills me, kills me I can’t remember the last conversation we ever had. You never think like that, do you? Like anything could be the last time you do it, at least not when you’re nine.


Father wasn’t a bad person. Until that night he’d never raised his voice; I’d never heard them fight. You could say that in a way it was his fault, that if he’d in another line of work …No, I can’t keep thinking like this, creating hypothetical situations that grow and gnaw away at me, poisoning me from the inside like they’re made of arsenic.

Mama used to leave me notes, and now they’re pretty much the only things I have left of her. There was no order to them. They were just as cluttered as our lives were. Bad jokes, reminders, the embodiment of her raw emotions.



Happy Monday

Out of the dozens she wrote me, I treasure one most of all. It’s nothing special, nothing out of the ordinary. But in a way it is, but only because it’s The Last. She gave it to me right before she left, pulled the Post-It from her pocket, smiled, kissed my forehead, said something about how I should have been in bed. Then I turned my back on her, but that doesn’t mean I loved her any less than she loved me. I went back upstairs, sank down underneath the quilts on my bed and cradled Teddy like he was my patchwork baby as I sang our lullaby.

Anyway, I guess I should really explain how I came to be here, writing this thing, this story of lives so finely intertwined that they can barely be distinguished. Well, the story inside this story doesn’t really have a beginning, but if I had to pick a moment, the single point in time when the course of my life changed for the better, I’d have to say when I met Miss, three months after I turned fifteen.

Fifteen-years, three months, twenty-eight days and counting.

The night before I met her, I sat on my bed, gazing down at the crumpled note, The Last, tracing my fingers over each droopy letter of her handwriting.








Smile, Be Happy!



I placed the note on the table and turned off the lamp and watched in slow motion as the room plunged into a still darkness. Reading was making me think, and thinking about her was like having my heart ripped from my chest all over again. I laid back on my pillow and watched the cluster of stars on the grey-black ceiling illuminate. The ones mother had brought for me “So I’d never have to be in the dark”. Three of them. I’m the smallest most distant star whose light is barely visible. Father is the biggest, the sun we revolved around. And the brightest, the true centre of our constellation, was for her.
I shut out the light, cleared my mind, ignoring the questions I could never answer.
No memories, no thoughts.
Just blank.


I must have drifted off. A place like that could never have existed in a world like ours. I must have dreamt it, dreamt for the first time since she… Anyway, there was a place, a place where broken glass was stardust, and guns only fired water. A place where if you fell, you’d glide back up into the sky and clocks never ticked. At dawn swans flew backwards into the emptiness of the night, then moulted, morphed into chicks, eggs, nothing. When I woke at twilight, the concrete and skyscrapers were covered in a dusting of white feathers, like the stars had fallen from the sky as I slept. At noon, the nothing swans became something, and by dawn they flew again. Payphones became telegrams. Steam poured into the chimney of first train. Edison un-invented the lightbulb a thousand times. Karl Benz peeled away at the pieces of the first car. De Vinci pulled paint from canvases with the tip of his brush. Dreams unravelled in children’s minds. The Renaissance became the Dark Ages, and Rome rose from its rubble. Eve placed the apple on the tree of knowledge. Adam melted into soil. And God said, “Let there be light!” And there was darkness. But that was just a dream.
I woke, bathed in grey beams of light, feeling no warmth. I didn’t get up for ages, didn’t see the point, didn’t want to get up. Just wanted to dream, but in the end, we’ve all got to wake up, face reality and blah, blah, blah.

Aunt Maria and her bike were already gone by the time I got downstairs. I walked down the labyrinth of halls, past antique pocket-watches and grandfather clocks, the only sound my sneakers rubbing against the marble tiles. It’s funny how this is the first time I thought about how weird that is, walking through a house full of clocks and hearing nothing. Since That Night every clock, on every shelf, in every box, stood still. I guess he must have done it after the cops came, pulled each clog and spring from their bodies, filling the house with a sterile silence. Mama hated that noise. The droning of the clogs and gears clinking in perfect unison. It was the ammunition for the fight, the catalyst for her death.







I was late for school. By the time I got there registration was already over. It was the first day of tenth grade, sophomore year and I had no idea where I was going, where my first period was. Great! I hurried through the maze of corridors, clutching my books to my chest, scanning every face, searching for one I knew. Anyone?











Anyone but Santana.

“Where you goin’, Mia, I thought we were friends?” Alicia Santana whispered snidely in my ear. “You know, having to look at a face like yours, makes me wish I was blind,”
‘With a mouth like that it makes me wish you were mute too,’ I imagined myself saying as I turned my back on her, grasping my books even closer to my chest like they were sheets of aluminium deflecting the laughter and the glares. I could never be that strong.
“Oh, and Sir told me to give this to you,” Alicia pulled a torn sheet from her bag and dropped it at her feet. “Whoops, clumsy me.” I waited till she was gone, then reached down, picking up the tattered piece of paper It was my timetable. It least I know what my first class was, English just down the hall.

I rushed to class just before the teacher did, a petite dark haired woman I’d never seen before.
She wrote her name on the board in neat joined-up letters, the polar opposite to the way mother used to write hers.

Miss Thompson-Willis

“Good morning class. Open your books and turn to a fresh page and write this as your title.” The chalk screeched against the blackboard.

When I was nine

I began to write: “My name is Mia Louise St. James and when I was nine years old my mother died. I brushed my teeth as the air rushed from her lungs. I sang as her blood stained the road. I dreamt as he drove off in our car into the cold of the night…”
What else could I have written? Anything else would have been
a lie.