I ought to archive our chat.

I am an avoidant person by nature, or maybe not. Maybe I learned to hide from things that scare me, like you who begat me and raised me. Maybe this is not nature but something deeper, something woven into the threads of my existence and impossible to unravel, even if I could attempt eternally to loosen the knot.

A group chat between a daughter and her parents is a normal thing, but perhaps my sample size has been unreliable. Most of the people I have around me seem to like their parents, or at the very least, trust them to be there if they have a need. Me, I hesitated to even make our group chat. I ended up creating it because I no longer wished to be accused of withholding information from one parent and not the other, as if it were a crime to assume that a married couple with children would speak to each other occasionally. I would rather my words be willingly misinterpreted in the least charitable way possible upon reading them, than for them to be twisted by the tongue of another into a cruel listener’s ear.

As an adult, you ought to be capable of talking to your parents. If I were to stretch, I’d even say you might want to speak to them. Even, and this is truly crazy, regularly! Surely, as adults, we have enough to say to each other that a mere five-minute call isn’t excruciatingly awkward and filled with loud silence and phone static. Surely, as adults, we are not dancing around each other as one party tries to find safe topics about which to speak, and the other waits, and waits, and waits, until the first party makes up a lie about having plans and needing to go.

I fail at remembering their existence most of the time, though the yawning ache in my gut remembers for me.

Until there is a new message in our chat of three, and all the pain and memories come back in a dizzying rush and I start running. My heart beats too strongly in the cage of my ribs, and my fingers are cold enough for my nails to turn blue. There is the dawning realisation that tonight, I might cry.

I ought to archive our chat.