I never thought I would block my best friend over a man.
But there was a time when I couldn't even imagine spending a day without talking to her.
We had been friends for years. She knew my secrets, my struggles, and even the things I was too embarrassed to tell anyone else.
Then he came along.
At first, neither of us seemed interested in him.
He was just a guy we occasionally saw around our circle.
Until one evening, he asked me for my number.
I told my best friend about it immediately.
She smiled and said, “Go for it.”
I trusted her.
My dad has always been protective, but honestly, there was a time when I thought he was taking it way too far.
I was 17 then. One Saturday, I went to my friend's house, and before I left, my dad told me, “Be back by 8.”
I said, “Okay, I will.”
I ended up getting home around 8:20 because there was traffic.
As soon as I walked through the door, he asked, “Where have you been?”
I told him, “There was traffic on the way back.”
He looked at me and said, “You weren't in traffic.”
I asked him, “How do you know that?”
That's when he told me he'd been tracking my location through my phone.
I was really annoyed.
My mother stopped using her dining room table about a year ago. Nothing dramatic happened. She didn’t move the furniture or announce anything. She simply started eating every meal on the small table in the kitchen. The dining room stayed perfectly clean, almost untouched. I assumed she was just tired of carrying plates back and forth, so I never questioned it. Then one afternoon, while helping her clean out a cabinet, I found a stack of old birthday cards tied together with a ribbon. They were all from my father, who had passed away several years earlier. I asked her why she kept them hidden away. She smiled and said she wasn’t hiding them. She just couldn’t bring herself to sit at that table anymore.
Most ladies don’t see the need to hit the gym while they’re in a relationship or married. It’s only after they break up with their partners that they start going.
The paper felt too thick between her fingers, heavy and coarse, like charcoal dusted canvas.
Amelia sat at her kitchen table late at night, the silence of the house pressing against her ears. Samuel was asleep upstairs, his breathing finally steady after hours of restless thrashing. On the table before her lay a blank sketchbook and a well-worn set of charcoal pencils.
She hadn't drawn in years not since before the car crash, before the hospital, before the grief took up permanent residence in her chest. But the silence tonight was too loud, and her mind kept returning to a single, nagging thought: If you give a fear a face, does it become easier to hold?