Boom

So. It's not my day. But - pretend it's Wednesday? This took me a long time to be happy with it. And I'm still not really overly pleased with it, but wanted to post it before the week was up.

"No one ever really wins in heartbreak warfare," John Mayer crackles through the shoddiest radio signal possible, and I'm thinking how perfectly suited the song is to the view above my dishwater. There's a moving truck outside the house two doors down.

Some of the neighborhood kids - just Elyse, Jacob, and Morgan now, but more are sure to come - are hanging around, hair bleached by the sun and, at ten o'clock in the morning, faces and pudgy hands already looking like they've been through some serious mudpie battles. They don't know the woman who's shoving a mattress into the back of the truck, but they know the girls, thirteen and fifteen, who are tearfully hugging the man standing on the doorstep.

Julia and Rachel have babysat the entire block, almost, so the six and eight and ten year-olds are out in force as, suitcases in hand, their icons walk down the driveway to meet them.
I can't hear the questions, but I was once the eight year-old tugging with grubby fingers on a teenage sleeve.

"Why do you have a suitcase?" Elyse is asking, as I once did, and Julia is answering the way that my own Julia, whose name I long ago forgot, did, saying something about moving and leaving.

"Why are you crying?" Jacob wonders, where I had known not to ask, but I was eight and he is six, and there is an eternity of wisdom to be gained in those two years. Rachel answers as my Rachel would have, I know: "It's just sad."

Morgan lisps as my sister lisped back then, struggling to ask why their father isn't helping pack the truck. Julia and Rachel look at each other as they hand pillows to their mother. "He's staying here," they answer, bracing themselves for the curious looks and childish questions.

"Why?" Elyse and Morgan ask at once; I know because we asked that question, then, not understanding what we asked, and not understanding the answer. Julia and Rachel answer in long, stilted, stuttering phrases, trying so hard to make sense of something that doesn't yet make sense to them - I see it in their faces, and I recall the struggle in the eyes of my idols as they put tentative hands on my shoulders and their mother glared from the sidelines, much as Julia and Rachel's mother does now.

The children are confused now, the three with their runny noses and faded shorts, and the others who, attracted by the anomaly of the moving truck, are gathering slowly around girls who only want to disappear.

I remember the confusion, remember being sad and not knowing why. Children cannot understand something that even, at fifteen, Rachel struggles to put to words, and I remember the confusion as I look out into the street, my crackling radio playing something completely different now, my dishwater getting cold.

There's nothing quite like heartbreak warfare; I know that now, with every fibre of my being; I have learned my lessons since that day when I abandoned my bicycle in the middle of our lazy street to watch and wonder at lamps and boxes marked "KITCHEN" piling their way into the back of a truck. Elyse and Morgan and Jacob will learn, too, and Rachel and Julia will one day understand how to put their sorrow into words, and I wish they wouldn't have to.

I wish that children wouldn't have to grow into understanding loss, that growing up didn't mean growing accustomed to heartbreak.

They don't understand, these small sun-bleached, sun-browned things, that this is their last goodbye, but they understand that something has changed. And as Rachel and Julia give them lingering hugs and wave silently at the man on the doorstep whose tears are rolling down his nose and soaking his beard, I watch the culmination of a battle lost before it even began and sigh.

Elyse turns around as the truck begins to pull away, and I catch a glimpse of her face beneath the dirt of a morning well spent. Her brow furrowed, her fingers tied in knots around each other, she's a mirror to the small self that I was, once, understanding only that something has changed, and I cry for her.

I cry for her innocence - will she, like me, one day replay the same scenario, bidding goodbye to neighbourhood children as she hands her mother a pillow and struggles not to look at the father crying bitter tears on the front lawn? Will she, like me, one day be powerless to stop the heartbreak from happening to her best friends? Will she, like me, one day watch out the window of her new kitchen, light glinting off the diamond on her finger, and wonder if, since no one ever really wins in heartbreak warfare, any of it is worth anything?