The Only One Who Remembers the Start

My heart isn't really with blogging.

The news about my cousin has hit so hard, I really don't know why it has.

I've not seen her since, oh, I guess 2022 or so.
Before that, it had been years and years and years since we'd seen each other.

Kim has led a very full life, gone places I can only dream about.

For years, she and her boyfriend lived on a boat in the Florida Keys.
Somewhere in Florida and for sure on a boat anyway.

We just lost touch, and then she had to move back to Tennessee for medical treatment.
She popped up on my Messenger, and we've been texting back and forth ever since.

Kim is the last link to my childhood.

Kim is the last person to really know and understand the hell we lived through.

There's no one else alive that grew up in that house, that lived through what we did.

Now Kim has a brother that is three years younger than me.
But no one even knows if he's alive or dead.

He got out of prison and went straight to the streets.
Homeless, we knew that much.
He was homeless.

He used to pop up in the police blotter for public drunkenness.
I've not seen him in that for years, though.

I wouldn't even know how to find him, and if we're being honest, I wouldn't want to find him.
He had very, very bad mental illness.

I still have a scar, a deep scar, on my leg where he shoved me down the outside stairs at my grandmother's house.
The stairs were concrete and about twenty stairs straight down a hill.
My leg hit one of those steps and, yeah, I have a nice dent in my leg.

Kim keeps sending me texts.

She's still finding dark humor in the situation.

She's always had stinky feet, I mean totally gross feet.
She says that the only place the cancer hasn't spread is to her feet.
Stink power to the rescue.

Dark humor is our way of coping.

To be honest, I've spent all day in bed.

Reading is my escape, and I've stayed wrapped up in my blanket reading today.

Badger had her weekly therapy, and she came home with pizza and a Dutch Bros coffee for me.

That was deeply appreciated.

I'm just not in the mood to human today.

What really sucks is that I only remember bits and pieces of my childhood.

Kim played it smart and went into therapy.
Her therapist told her that we'd endured such hell that our brains had simply erased a lot of our childhood.
We'll never get those memories back.

There's some things that stick out still.

Kim taught me and her brother how to walk silently, how to be in a room but be invisible, and she made a game of it.
“We're going to be spies, and you've got to learn to be quiet.”
Being invisible was a very good skill.

I remember how one summer she had us digging to China, and boy, did we manage to get a pretty deep hole before we got caught.
That switching we got was worth it.

She used to play drive-in and sneak in the house to make me and her brother milkshakes.
We weren't allowed in the house in the summer.
We got in the way.

When we knew a whupping was coming, she'd grab us and we'd dive under a bed and not come out until my grandmother cooled down a bit.
Usually we'd still get a whupping plus extra for hiding.

That last time before she and her brother went into foster care, that last huge fight between our mothers.

I know when people hear two sisters fighting, they picture dainty little cat fights.

Oh no.
Our moms would go at each other with fists.
Heaven help you if you got in the way.
I've had a glass broken over my head once by my aunt.

They didn't care.
They'd just go at each other, shoving and punching and hitting and cussing.

That last time, something snapped in Kim, and I wish I remembered how old we were.

I don't remember.

But Kim ran.
She just took off running, and me and her brother ran right behind her.

But we got a ways from the house and got scared, and we went back.

Not Kim.

She kept running, and the rest I don't remember.

I remember Tennessee Department of Human Services (DHS) coming.
I remember caseworkers.
I remember being kept away from the house and made to stay in my room, made to stay silent.

They sent Kim and her brother to foster care, but they never realized three kids lived in that house, not two.

Kim apologized for leaving me behind when we started texting.

It must have weighed heavy on her mind all these years.

We were kids.
I never faulted her for running.

Yeah, anyway.

Sappy, sappy, sappy.

I'm going back to bed.

Blue funk is my usual state, especially this time of year.

Now this.