I used to think I was a normal kid. The differences between most kids I knew and me were few, but major. I’ve always had an especially strong bond with my family, which to me, is my mother Stacie and my sister Celeste. My mom’s two husbands were constantly straining to win affection from Celeste and me, but to us they remained neutral people. Like pieces of furniture that were always present, a vague addition to memories but not meaningful ones. Except when they abandoned their role of background fixtures and became swirling tornadoes of rage, threatening to destroy my mother’s fragile self-esteem. But the happy times outweighed the bad. Things weren’t perfect, but I recognized that the world could be both ugly and beautiful. I found peace and things to be happy about, never worried for long about problems that were small and easily fixable. While in those childhood and early teen years which I have so recently left, I never imagined that I would become a brooding teenager, the daughter of an alcoholic mother.

So many things have changed since then. My house, school, the state I lived in. My hair color.

I had just turned seventeen. That morning I crunched down the hill by the district office, on icy sidewalks and grass that acccompanied the glassy fog of my breath. My boots were dark, with socks pulled over dark pants. I was wearing a thick coat over a sweater, knitted gloves, and a hat. So many layers protecting me from November in western Washington, but still the chill of the early morning clung to my body. I thought briefly of the large brick building on the Mount Vernon High School campus that I should’ve been inside, and the Algebra II that I should’ve been learning, but as I cut class I remember thinking that overall, this was a much better use of my time.

Headphones on, listening to Death Cab for Cutie croon his poems set to music, his starkly beautiful sentences sank into my heart and into my mood. He sang, “The rhythm of my footsteps crossing flatlands to your door have been silenced, forevermore… And the distance is quite simply much too far for me to row…”

I related the lyrics I heard to Joey, my first love and boyfriend of two years, and to last year when I was blissfully unaware that I didn’t have much time before he moved two states away. From northern Washington to southern California is a distance that can be driven in a few days, but too far to be any comfort to me.

I walked across the overpass into downtown Mount Vernon where the spicy warm smells of the natural foods co-op confronted my nose. There was a crowd spilling out from their packed deli, hippie looking people with dreadlocks who gripped steaming cups of coffee and chatted cheerfully. The music played on in my ears, muting the voices around me, the steps of people on the pavement, and the cars that drove by in the puddled filled street.

I continued on, hands stuffed snuggly deep into my pockets, up the small hill past the art store to the bridge that separated east from west Mount Vernon. I walked slowly across the structure. I stopped and leaned over the edge to admire the steel gray of the cold river beneath me, the ghostly way water appeared in winter, so harsh and uninviting. The current flowed south as I walked west, crossing over to the other side and turning immediately left into the park.

The water and the air were cold, but I had grown warm under all my layers and unzipped my coat as I walked down past the playground and field to a secluded clearing that opened into the river once I walked past the trees. The water was too high to get too far, so I perched on the edge. Toes close to the icy water, I watched its perpetual flow and marveled at this one permanent thing in the world, one force that goes on no matter the constant change of fleeting things around it. It was solid and consistent.

I thought of five years earlier, when everything in my life was so different. A different step father, a different, home, a mother who I’d never seen drunk, no concept of romantic relationships or that feeling that chokes me when someone I love is far away. And five years earlier, this river had been flowing the same way, at the same rate and down the same route as it did now. Ice had been melting in the mountains and moving downhill to the Skagit River and then out to the Puget Sound for more centuries than I could imagine.

I unzipped a pocket of the bag hanging at my side and brought out a box holding two cigarettes and a dark blue lighter. I stuck a cigarette between my lips and shielded it from the breeze to light it. I flashed back to a few nights earlier when I saw my mom make the exact same movement as we sat in two plastic chairs under a dim light bulb that hangs from the awning of our house. It was late, and she was slurring her words as she tried to explain to me things I couldn't understand. She apologized over and over for being drunk, and repeated things she’d already said and forgotten as she always does when she’s that gone. Between little sobs and sentences that made no sense she mumbled a few words that told me of the fight she and my step dad had earlier.
“He wants me to be perfect. I just can’t do it. I can’t be perfect,” she said.

“Nobody’s perfect, mom,” I said.

Beyond the small circle of light that shined out of our one lonely light bulb, the night suddenly seemed darker.

This was the way it had been going most nights for the last many months. It didn’t always end with us talking about what happened, but it always ended up with her drunk, hammered in the kitchen, banging and dropping things, pretending to be sober enough to put the dishes away. I don’t know if the act was for her or me, but it didn’t make either of us feel better. A few hours later she would be in bed if she made it, or blacked out on the bathroom floor. Her husband Scott would try to bring her to bed, but he wasn't strong enough to pick up and carry anyone. So he would have to wait until she was at least conscious, then drag her drooping frame over his shoulder to the bed.

I squeezed my eyes shut to erase that vision from my mind. There were other things in life to be happy about. I told myself to go back, to find the best memory I could think of. The cold river and gray sky faded away and for a moment I stood on a street on a Seattle night, city lights reflecting in the unnaturally large pupils of the people around me. I went back to that summer night when Joey and I stood outside the WAMU Theater, hearts pumping and minds alight with the effects of the magical potion we’d drank earlier that magnified every good sound or sensation and made it the best thing in the world. The cigarette we passed back and forth filled my head with a buzz that was as fantastically beautiful as the night around us. The music of Kaskade boomed. The theatre was packed with a massive crowd cheering and dancing and pulsing together under the spectacle of lights that flashed around us. And in the front, commanding this huge audience, was one of my favorite musicians, DJ Kaskade, playing songs I’d only dreamed of hearing live. I felt like the whole night was a page ripped out of an imaginary book that described my dream life.

I traveled back three years further, to when my mom and first step dad divorced, and her, my older sister Celeste, and I lived alone. It was morning, and mom was driving us to school, and we were all smiling and laughing despite the fact that it was a Monday. When it was just the three of us, we were always happy, it didn’t matter that life was suddenly different and we had no money. Every night we ate dinner together, and I would tell her about things we were doing at school, or new songs we were learning in band. She listened and had always had something sweet to say. She never responded with a patronizing, “Mmhmm, that’s nice sweetie.”

Most nights we would talk about ridiculous things, like how Celeste’s history teacher resembled a walrus or other stupid bits of life that were so funny for no reason. I remember one time Celeste was making fun of something I had said, so I flicked an olive in her direction. It landed on her hand and she squealed and threw one back. Soon we were all chucking the remnant olives from that night’s tacos at each other. One whizzed through the air and landed in my hair, another hit the window and stuck. Finally, hysterical, we realized that all the olives had been thrown and we collapsed into laughter. That was how my mom used to be; free, fun, my best friend.

A gust of wind shook the flashback from my mind. I remembered that despite every good thing that had ever happened, no matter how many Sundays of my childhood were spent with my mom at church, no matter how many years I remember her as a loving mother, there were some things she couldn’t handle. I knew it wasn’t all Scott’s fault. Mom’s parents divorced when she was twelve, and after that she never received much familial support. I don’t think she’d ever been fully at peace. Her dad was distant and her relationship with her mom was shaky. At nineteen after giving birth to Celeste she left our drug addict father and moved in with her dad and his wife and started over. She tried to put her past insecurities behind her and focused on being a mother, and for a long time it worked. Then we grew up, her second marriage fell apart and then she married Scott. But that didn’t develop into the fairytale she expected and all the sadness that she thought she had buried somehow rose up again. I don’t know the whole story. I don’t know every past demon that haunted her because she kept things from me. She changed when she became a mother, into a happier person with more purpose, and that’s the only version I knew of her. Until recently.

So many factors collided at just that wrong time and velocity, and after the dust settled, she was left clinging to alcohol. It was the last thing I would have ever imagined to happen to her, and it didn’t make sense to me. But nothing made sense anymore. This was my mom who taught Sunday school at our Nazarene church, smiling in front of the kids, wearing a bright red skirt and looking like the picture of happiness. I didn’t know how things had crumbled so far. I didn’t know what, if any, role I played in her ordeal or how I could help. I just knew I was sad and cold. And it seemed like it had been this way for so long.

This bone chilling winter made me long for summer just as the pressing heat of July makes me wish for December. But when the chill in my life was from something besides the weather, all I could remember and wish for were the times before when there was a warmth in my soul that I had taken for granted. Now, being in both a literal and internal winter, I shivered. It started on my skin but I felt it go inside my soul until my whole body was trembling like the leaves clinging to branches above me.

When I checked the time it was nine a.m. I calculated how long it would take to walk back to school, and realized I had to leave. So I exhaled one last drag and flicked the butt where it fell, hissing, into the eternal river.

Hands in pockets and headphones on, I walked off in that huddled way that defined my mood and actions those first few months of my junior year. I was blown with the wind at my back across the bridge and onto the boardwalk that lined a small section of the river. It was so small, such a tiny structure of twigs that for some reason pulled my heart out and left it flopping at my feet. I could remember every Fourth of July for years, sitting on that boardwalk and watching the fireworks shoot and flare in the sky, lighting up the faces of my mom and Celeste and illuminating the crowd around us.

This mood lingered just as the rain did, and I felt the net of drops form on my hat like tiny bits of cloud. I stopped in at the co-op and tried fleetingly to do my algebra homework, though I soon lost patience, and packed up and left. My next class was French, which I slumped through, absorbing the beautiful words but none of the general happiness of the people around me. After I would return home and work on assignments for the online course I was taking at the local community college.

At 11:02 I took the short walk from the building to the back parking lot. I glanced at the cemetery adjacent to the high school, tombstones barely fifty yards away.

“No wonder this places always feels so grim,” I thought as I pulled away in my little blue Kia, heater roaring.