Vicky - Living With

“Nothing,” I say. And for once, it’s the truth.

Vicky seemed to understand anyway. She reached over and stole the last spring roll off my plate. “It’s okay,” she said. “I’ll wait.” Last week, I came home from a really bad day. The kind where nothing catastrophic happens, just a thousand small failures stacked on top of each other until you feel like you’re drowning in mediocrity. I walked in the door and Vicky took one look at my face and said, “Get in the car.” living with vicky

I’m not good at talking. Vicky knows this. She’s always known. The thing about Vicky is that she feels everything at full volume. Joy, sadness, anger—it all comes out the same way: loud, messy, and honest. When she’s happy, she laughs so hard she snorts, and then laughs harder at the snort. When she’s sad, she doesn’t hide it. She cries openly, ugly-cries with red eyes and wet cheeks, and she lets you hold her until it passes. “Nothing,” I say

“Where are we going?”

“You look like garbage,” she announced, pushing past me with a suitcase in one hand and a paper bag in the other. “I brought dumplings.” She reached over and stole the last spring roll off my plate

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.