Charlotte, Sometimes
by Emily McPhillips
Her parents had aged in the week she’d been absent, because in her head she remembered them as those people who kept an invisible fence around her, and even though she couldn’t see it, she could feel it, and she knew when to start slowing down her pace; before the air would tighten like the tension of an audience gasping their breath, and time would feel like it had stopped still, waiting for all the bodies in the room to deflate their lungs and live again.
She understood that they were all adapting to this new change in their lives. She was the youngest, and the last to leave home, and they had all been excuses to each other. They were happy in a stagnant way that meant pre-existing happiness could be repeated, but the life of this had worn thin and they could each look through it through peep holes. Each of them would see each other in the roles that they had been assigned; a mother, a father, and a daughter, a dependable trio that failed to realise that they had all grown up now. Their daughter only felt like Charlotte, sometimes. When she packed away her things she did it quietly, and her parents hushed and they brought her boxes, and it took her all day to pack everything, because feeling sad made simple things turn to knots.
In her new house Charlotte sat on her bed, a double bed, and she missed her single bed, because she felt alone right now, and that this space beside her was designed for an extra body; double the legs, double the arms. She filled the space with cushions and teddies, things that were soft that she would like to lean into. Her duvet cover was only big enough for a single bed, and it floated in the centre of the bed like the yolk of an egg. She felt that she understood that love was solitary and that she loved her parents for reasons far beyond circumstance, that love was created alone and could only be created on our own. She knew she’d grow to love her new room.
Then she thought about how her parents were like a perfectly drawn straight line that connected her past to her present; that she could follow with her fingertips and make sense of, because this line never changed. But then she thought of this line turning into a tight rope, an unsteady line of tension that hovered in mid air, a vast drop on either side, and she knew that this line could be followed as easily as the drawn line, except now a consciousness pervaded her that filled her with fear, and lines felt like a challenge, sticking to one direction was hard. Her parents could be seen as dots some distance away, acting as weights on either end of the rope, a squint of the eye and there would be nothing there at all. It felt like she was learning how to walk all over again.
In the kitchen of her parent’s house, she watches them between the actions of boiling a kettle, lighting the stove, swirling a fork around pasta shells. Her mother is in a nightgown, her freshly washed hair is curling at the ends, her bare legs are exposed, and she moves back and forth, in and out of view, unabashed as she arranges her underwear across a radiator. The pasta shells are softening as she tests them with a probing fork. Her father walks towards the kitchen sink, squinting at a label on a jar, his glasses atop his head that are almost lost in all that grey hair, and Charlotte moves beside him and drains the pasta, shaking all the water away, and up rises a cloud of steam that makes them both cough, except his sounds more trembling and fierce. She thinks he sounds like someone who does not last forever, and her parents look as small as ants as they carry on living as best as they know how.