The man in a suit inside the TV is talking about inflation, and I don’t know what this word means, so I ask Mom and Dad but they just wave me silent.

The throw pillows, too, are silent, and they, too, look lonely on this couch. I jiggle a pillow with my left hand, Hi I’m a pillow, and jiggle another with my right hand, Oh hi, I’m a pillow too, and as both jiggle and chuckle, they say in unison, Let’s be pillow friends! Mom lets out a heavy sigh and Dad gets up to turn up the volume on the TV. This only forces the pillows to talk louder, and then Mom and Dad are shushing them, me, and pursing their lips, barking offended Pleases, calling me difficult—but I don’t know how not to be difficult. I need them to teach me.

So I ask for their help: I wail and I kick and I exit the room running.

I hide in the laundry room. Hiding is an invitation to be found. Meanwhile, I cry and I wait. I cry over the sound of footsteps, cling wrap, clinking glass, fridge door, glass on glass, fridge door, footsteps, pot lid, cracked egg, trash can, cabinet, running water, running drawer, dancing spoons, footsteps, footsteps just on the other side of this wall. I cry until I’m a puddle of tears and snot and loneliness. Until I’m dry on the inside.

Then, I notice. A whisper. They’ve come, I trust, and lift my head. I see legs towering over me. Ten of them. Too many. Too narrow. Too quiet. They’re lifeless legs: the table’s, the chair’s, the Singer machine’s. The whisper comes from the TV in the living room, so that’s where my parents are. If I can hear their TV, how can’t they hear my cry? I don’t want to be heard, but all I want is to be heard.

I reach for the wooden legs, iron legs, steel legs, but none of them seem to notice me. Otherwise, why wouldn’t they bend down and ask, Menina, are you okay?

I’m not okay.

I’m not sure I can see the legs anymore, or anything, not because it’s dark around me, though it is that, too, but because it’s dark inside me, because the room is suddenly unreal, and maybe I am unreal, since I can’t feel my feet, or my fingers, since I’m spilling over, and as I lose my shape all the known things also lose theirs, like the legs and the hours and the tiles and the coldness of the tiles and the idea that cold or hot even matter. I don’t want to exist; I already don’t exist.

Back in the living room, I find my parents, position unchanged. As if the pots and the spoons and the shoes in the kitchen had moved on their own. The TV has moved from news to soap opera. The hour hand on the clock has moved from one number to the next. Only my parents haven’t, and still don’t as I re-enter the room. Noses pointed at the TV, they don’t spare a glance or grunt to acknowledge me. I sit on the floor and point my nose at the TV, too, not yet knowing how to navigate my feelings but already knowing how to imitate behavior. The right behavior, I learn, is one that mutes all feelings. What I don't learn then, and won’t learn for years to come, is that the feelings we avoid are precisely the ones that control us.

For years to come, I’ll reenact the laundry room scene trying for a different ending. With friends, boyfriends, husband—there’ll be a fight, and I’ll exit the room, exit the house running, meander around the block, sobs, arms crossed, the tall lamp posts floating tight-lipped above my head. Each time I’ll expect the other person to come; not once will I trust they will.


The morning after, I go back to the laundry room. The pieces of furniture look different in the daylight, when they don’t smell like cry. That morning, and every morning after that, the Singer machine acts steely, the chair hostile, the table distant. Not a blink as I pass them by. They look unperturbed, as if nothing happened, as if they hadn’t even witnessed a child learning the game of distrust.

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