Fear
Date: 10 October 2026
Content note: neglect, a parent’s drinking.
This answer continues in The Door with the Holes.
We moved every two years, and to me it was always an adventure, a chance to start over. You can’t lose friends if you only ever make acquaintances.
So the unfamiliar never frightened me. Home did. Fear that never ceases becomes background noise. It’s hard to remember the first time I was afraid, because I tuned it out.
One moment does stand out. My mother had been abroad for two years, presumably finding herself. While she was gone, I invented her: an idealized mother who gave me all the tenderness I was missing. Then she came back.
Years later I understood that it wasn’t her that frightened me. It was the distance between the mother who walked back in and the one I had made up, and the realization that the one I had made up would never materialize.
I was about nine. MommaPete had just moved into a beachfront condo at the Marisol on South Padre Island. To me it was a temple, and her bedroom was its holy of holies. Sand drifted into every corner. Passageways were tightly bordered by towering brick canyons. The brick was the color of slightly burned bread. In a cubbyhole by the pool, a Coke machine hummed day and night, waiting for my quarters. The dunes came right up to her balcony. I loved to visit. My home was on the other side of the island.
MommaPete drank, and by afternoon I was usually on my own. At the pool I fell into friendships with vacationers’ kids, friendships that ended when their week did.
So when I fell and a stranger picked me up off the concrete, there was no one to run to. She carried me inside to find MommaPete, past the Coke machine, through the cool of the passageways, into the holy of holies.
MommaPete was passed out on the bed. The stranger put me down, sat on the edge of the bed, and let out a long sigh.
Nobody explained who this woman was. “It’s just me” was all she said, and it explained nothing. I worked it out myself.
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