Free Writing Our Song by Emma South

if I didn’t stop her she wouldn’t even hear my question.
    “Mom!”
    “What?”  She paused.
    “Do you…”
    My heart began pounding in my ears and I felt the familiar flush of heat across my neck and face, the shortness of breath and hopeless terror that had reduced me to a shaking wreck on more than one occasion.  I had to get it out quickly.
    “Do you still… love me?”
    The room was deathly quiet between each boom of my heartbeat, my shallow breaths barely audible even to myself as I awaited her response.  I couldn’t look at her, instead I stared at my breakfast through half-closed eyes.  Would she just come over and give me a hug?
    I could almost feel it, the warmth, the sense that I could just close my eyes and be held for a few seconds without having to worry about the past, the future, guilt, grief, anything.  A few seconds of peace.
    “Don’t be late for school,” she said, and walked out.
    For a few moments I sat in silence, gripping the edge of the kitchen table until my knuckles turned white.  I wasn’t sure if the panic would bubble over until I screamed or not.  In the end, it didn’t.  All the terror seemed to melt away and I repaired my armor, replaced that one brick in the wall.
    Behind the wall I felt like that struggling little spark of pure-Bea was finally extinguished.  In my mind it was replaced with a vial of some inky black poison with a little ‘break in case of emergency’ sticker on it.  Like a cold-war-era spy with a fake tooth full of cyanide, I had to carry it inside of me and if I knocked it too hard, if I let anybody past the wall, it would break and that would be the end.
    “I won’t be,” I whispered to my long gone mom.
    *****
    Several weeks later I was glad I had asked that question to my mom and received that response.  A girl with a kernel of hope wouldn’t have made it through what happened next.  I came home from school to an empty house, not that that was anything new, but something was different.
    When I was a little kid I’d had a similar feeling one day as I sat on the couch watching a cartoon after school.  Something was different and it distracted me during the entire show so afterwards I could never really remember if the princess had been rescued by the prince.
    It turned out that the old reclining chair that used to sit in the corner was gone.  It had been there my whole life, so constant that it was just part of the background scenery.  Apparently a new chair was being delivered and the old one had become something called landfill.
    No biggie, it was just a chair, but the feeling of something missing was there again and I wandered the house trying to figure out what it was.  Then I spotted it, the shoe rack next to the front door was nearly empty.
    Shoes had always been a weakness of my mom’s, she loved buying shoes that only went with one outfit, or any shoes that caught her eye really.  She’d really held back while my dad was around but since those roses started turning up on our mantelpiece the shoe population of the house had certainly grown.
    Now the shoe rack looked sort of like a ghost town, with just a pair of my boots sitting there beside the shoes I had kicked off without really looking only a few minutes previous.  All my mom’s shoes were gone.
    With eyebrow raised I looked around the house some more, spotting several more of my mom’s belongings mysteriously missing.  Upstairs in my parents’ room the difference was impossible to miss, the room was almost barren.
    In their closet, most of my mom’s things were gone, the only items left had been my dad’s.  This was where she had shoved all his things.  Behind boxes of clothes and various other things I could see his guitar case and sighed when I remembered how I hadn’t listened to his song before quickly closing the door.
    Back downstairs in the kitchen I saw a plain white envelope on the table with my name written in black pen across the front.  I sat down