Vicky doesn’t believe in closed doors. She’ll barge into my room at seven in the morning, already mid-sentence about some dream she had where our childhood dog could talk and kept asking her for tax advice. She leaves half-empty coffee mugs everywhere—on the bathroom counter, inside the linen closet, once in the freezer next to the peas. She sings in the shower, and not well. She sings like a goose being slowly lowered into a woodchipper.
I looked at her. Really looked. And for the first time, I saw the cracks in her armor. The same cracks I had. Just hidden differently. living with vicky
But she also makes pancakes on Sundays. The kind with chocolate chips arranged in smiley faces. And when I come home from work, exhausted and quiet, she doesn’t ask what’s wrong. She just hands me a mug of tea and sits next to me on the couch, close enough that our shoulders touch, and scrolls through her phone until I’m ready to talk. Vicky doesn’t believe in closed doors
I was standing in my kitchen, staring at a leak under the sink that I’d been ignoring for a week, when the doorbell rang. She sings in the shower, and not well
Vicky nodded. “Yeah. Me too.”