number nine

in the photograph, my father is playing guitar. i am four years old, and this is before the summer that seemed to mark the beginning of everything falling apart. this is before i grew up too fast, before my father left us, before my mother let her grief turn her into something foreign. this is before . . . everything. and i don’t remember the picture being taken, and i wish i did.

my father would play guitar, and my mother and i would sing. i was four, and we moved out of the apartment and into our house on wagon road. i would eat breakfast at the kitchen island table with my father. my mother took me to school and picked me up in the afternoon. i drew pictures almost every day. we sat around the square table next to the bay window for dinner. it was carved into round bumps around the edges, like wooden corn kernels. i would run my fingers over them, my earliest memory of comfort. after dinner, we would play music in the living room. i remember dancing to the moody blues. my father called me ‘bug’- from ‘snug as a bug in a rug’. that’s what he said when he tucked me in.

four years old. we were happy, then, i think– or maybe i was too young to see the signs, to count the ways that my definition of security was beginning to fail. maybe there were cracks, splinters, too many faultlines even then-

but i’m not going to believe that. i want to think that, once upon a time, we were happy. my father played guitar, and my mother and i would sing. we would all sit on their large walnut bed, my father leaning against the headboard, me leaning against the footboard, and one night, my mother took a photograph.