Night blankets the sky with purple chrome. The air fills with the cricket’s chirp. The howl of the owls silence the cry of the birds. Old domestic cats wander. Margaret and I are coming back from the corner store. I decide that now is the best time to have another serious talk with her. We both dread these talks but words are the only thing I can use to build her back up. Words are a piece of the recycled puzzle.

 I clear my throat, “Can we talk before we go back in?” We sit on the stairs of her porch with our plastic bag of sweet, chewy sucrose. I have grown so weak from trying to pull her out of the mud but the mud is starting to feel like cement. Watching her descend to depths I’ve barely made it out of is like reliving it. Piles of dirty dishes and dirty clothes litter the floor, grades go unchecked, the world outside of the house disintegrates. It is so easy to fall into the portal of The Depression Dimension. There is always a bed and all 8 seasons of a crappy 90s sitcom to land on.

I can hear her heart chugging like the train off in the distance. “I think you should stop missing so much school,” I say. Her head sinks. Then — as if she’s suddenly realized her defense — her eyebrows crash into each other like violent waves. 

On queue she says, “It’s easy for you to criticize my life when you have no idea what I’m going through.” 

Then I say, “I’m not criticizing you, I’m worried about you. You aren’t going to graduate”

And she ends our monotonous conversation to nowhere with, “So?”