December 31^st 1999: We all stayed the night at a mid-range hotel in the town next to our own just outside of Boston. The boys and I had spent the past few days sliding around unfinished hardwood panels in our socks, and eating off our family room couch we’d crammed into the kitchen to make space for the new floors. We knew nothing of Y2K, or what was to come, nor did we care for anything but that our parents had turned our house into an empty playground. Laughing into the cold Massachusetts air, we ran to the Jeep and our mother, smiling, said “hold on” as she tried to unlock the car fast enough for her eager children and their father. So we wore sunglasses in the shape of “2000” into the night of the new year while big men turned our house back into a home.

November 6^th 2016: The aging hardwood floor of our Allston apartment was flush against my cheeks, saturated with saltwater, creaking back at my bones. The only words glued to my mind were “hold on”, that guttural “hold on” that slips out of your throat when someone is about to leave and your scrambling brain can’t muster a real reason to stay. 5 Christmases deep, this is how we measured our relationship as neither of us could remember, or care to remember, our anniversary, as although we lived together, (and as our parents loved to remind us), we were not married. We never wanted to get married. Though sometimes with snowflakes in our eyes we’d say “I want to marry you on top of a mountain”. Then an avalanche hits. 

February 25^th, 2005: I think my mother remembers the hardwood, too, but I remember the rotary phone that sat on her nightstand. It was beige with gold accents and colored lightly with pastel roses. The flowers shook violently in her hands, her planted on the floor, her legs hunched up so that she’d be able to fetal herself if her daughter weren’t sitting in her lap. The tightly coiled cord was sprawled out, strained, holding onto the base by a thread. Her sprawled on the floor, strained, holding onto her composure like a child on a balloon, and soon everything was up in the air. Her, shrieking brokenhearted profanities into the line, the voice on the other end yelling the same, only deeper, cutting deeper, and with salt in hand. A neighbor’s knock on the door was the first call for my older brother to step into his new role. He was thirteen and the man who answered the door now. Thirteen with cheeks that hadn’t quite forgotten their baby fat, thirteen and the big brother, who had just become the big man. He answered the door to a neighbor who thought someone had died in our home that day. Something did.

August 8^th 2016: The moment I departed, sanity started decaying. A concept that doesn’t quite feel real anymore, like a butterfly I could have sworn sat for a moment on my shoulder but now it seems like it could have just been the wind. Sitting in the driver’s seat of this body, it was what felt like an immediate and irreversible biological reaction. Sitting in the driver’s seat of my car, I stopped mid- rush hour traffic on Beacon Street and told you, “something’s wrong”. You looked at me, anguished, and urged us to just go home. I buried my head into my steering wheel and tried to persuade the cancer in my bones not to come for me, the air to stop standing still and find its way to my lungs, and my heart to sincerely calm the fuck down. With the chemical panic seeping into my bloodstream, I slipped over my center console and directed you to take me to the hospital. Shaky in line at the emergency room, I stumbled over how to tell the intake nurse that I was facing certain imminent death. It turned out to be the sort of death that doesn’t wipe you from this planet but rather stays with you the rest of your days. That night you drove me back to my mother’s house. As my bare feet greeted the 17-year-old wood I tried to ground myself to no avail. This was the beginning of a war. It was selfish to ask you to stay. The past 6 years your arms were my home.  As much as we always wanted to hold onto each other at some point everybody’s hands slip, they lose grip, they let go.

July 20^th 1998: Most of my memories of this day are representative of all my early birthdays. We’d wake up and storm down the wooden steps, anxious to spend all day at Revere beach, you, Mom, and me, and the boys, and dad. We’d play in the sand and seaweed, build castles and countries, jump into the choppy ocean. Even though it was always one of the hottest days of the year, the water never failed to be frigid. We’d walk across the street, barefoot, to Bianchi’s and eat pizza slices as big as our faces with sand sprinkled atop like salt and pepper, heat beating down on all of it. The boys would try to feed our crusts to the gulls and receive attacks instead of thank yous. This place will always have a hold on me. There is a photo of us that encapsulates all of this, on this day, just me and you, you’re holding me above your head, the both of us basking in the golden light, sun shining out of our smiling mouths, this is how I picture you, ten feet tall, summer coursing through you, not on the floor, not alone, but with me, at home.

July 22^nd 2018: “Home is where you die” reads the tattoo on the arm of the local bartender I’ve got a giant crush on. The text sits inside an outline of Massachusetts and my eyes trace the black block letters every time he turns around. I’m sitting with my mother, nursing a giant margarita as she suckles down diet cokes. I’ve just shown her my new apartment. It’s bigger than my old one, I tell her. I’m in a better place now, I tell her. It has brand new shiny hardwood floors and will be filled with brand new shiny friends. I tell her nothing is more valuable than being surrounded by people who remind you how big and small the world is at the same time. Sometimes moving in circles feels like moving on. Sometimes any form of movement feels like progress amongst sunk costs. Sometimes I watch the lies I tell myself turn to truth before my eyes. Sometimes you’ve got to listen to your mother, and just keep holding on. 

– K.P. Hubbard