Before Townshill, I had another life. In fact it's so far back sketched in my past, I sometimes wonder if it was just pieces of an old movie I somehow applied to my memory. Maybe the recollections are just idealistic daydreams, but I do recall a period of time when my Dad, Mom, and I were a family—full-fledged and living in flesh.

I always knew I never had that picturesque, standard epitome of a family that magazines like Family Circle via the 1950s shoved down your throat. Growing up in a fifth floor walk-up in Dorchester, most of our neighbors were young students or recent college graduates—as the area we lived in was ideal for easy public transportation to the surplus of colleges that started near us and stretched throughout the heart of the city. Back then, I wasn't aware of how young my parents really were, but seeing as how my Mom got pregnant in high school, it's hard to believe sometimes that when they were my age, an unexpected child had to be built-in into all of their own plans.

In Dorchester, our  neighbor across the hall was a newly registered nurse at Mass General, so every time I'd get a scrape on my knee or my temperature would rise too high above the norm,  Mom or Dad would take my hand and walk across the hall to knock on Maia's door. For the most part, she would open it with her welcoming gap-toothed smile and usher us inside. There, she'd fluidly bat the thermometer out of my Mom's grip or gently untangle the mountains of gauze my Dad would mummify me with over a tiny paper cut, and fix me up. When my parents would chitchat afterwords, I'd entertain myself by teasing her Siamese cat Phoenix, who always appeared as if she could care less if I was there, gazing down at me with condescending blue eyes.

Back then, I wasn't able to pick up on the gravity of the situation because of my age—how sometimes Maia's  voice cracked as my Mom spoke in nurturing whispers, their roles reversed with Maia playing the part of the one being healed. At the age of six or seven, I was too filled with that raw naivety that children with good parents have. I'd never had known that neighbors could be beaten by the hands of their own toxic boyfriends, or that my parents were two young and unmarried students, barely making it by themselves.

Living in that section of Boston—filled with an assortment of people of different races and unrelated lifestyles—I'd never have noticed that the shape of my family was poles apart from those of my classmates at the small school in Quincy my parents drove me to every morning, either. More often than not, we'd have to stop at least once to open the hood to pour a water bottle into the radiator to cool down the engine, but that didn't matter. We always got to where we needed to go.

If a stranger were to look at my parents outside of my perspective where they were mutually interchangeable, I guess they looked visibly different too . Maybe it appeared as if they didn't belong together, that they were two separate fragments from a stained glass window—that made a very colorful image when put together—but incomplete. Nonetheless, there was no denying that they were much younger than my classmates' parents, standing and walking with an uncertain step among the other moms and dads dropping off their kids in polished mini-vans and shiny, clicking shoes.

So when I think back to my young childhood—or at least the parts that I can remember—that's what I recall the most. I can vividly still walk through our two bedroom apartment right off Ashmont street, where outside my bedroom window you could see the water tower with rainbow striped paint marks. Sometimes I find myself showering in the bathroom that was so small, Dad had to sit on a chair when he showered so he wouldn't hit his head off the ceiling.  As a matter of fact, most of my senses remember: 

The itchiness from the couch we got at the Salvation Army. The buzzing of laughter bouncing around the apartment when Mom hosted study sessions with her classmates, laughter and wine spilling out of their of paper cups. The smell of the corner coffee shop  where Dad and I would stop on Sunday mornings to pick up the Boston Globe and a dozen of donuts. The melting summer sun as we'd walk the two miles to Dot's Market to meet my Mom after her shift, our three shadows bouncing off the pavement with whatever fruit was in season at the store bursting with saccharine tang in our mouths. The days spent riding my bike around the Sugar Bowl as my parents studied in the grass at Castle Island, and the dusky nights where Dad carried me on his shoulders as I looked up at the sky all bring me back to a place in time that stands still in my memory.

Although I can never commit to memory where my parents weren't worrying over bills or having tense words behind closed doors,  leaving all their secrets hidden in the dim glow of their bedroom, everything seemed OK. Those discolorations never prompted me to believe that my mother could ever walk out with a long note explaining her reasons why, never to return to that fifth level walk-up. 

Everything changed when she left.

The morning she walked out, she was wearing her work uniform, the green cloth peeking out like a secret underneath the UMass hoodie she normally wore to class. She left my father a three page letter: I know this because he sat at the kitchenette table reading and rereading it until the sun started falling out of the sky, the pages crumbling at the edges, only coming to when it became so dim he could no longer see the writing in front of his face. 

That was the worst week, the first one. The milk went bad, his face went unshaved. I opened my lunch box  more than once to find he'd packed only the container of Ziploc bags and a juice box. I didn't really know what was going on. I mean, I noticed my Mom was gone, but it didn't seem like something permanent. I didn't know where she went, or why, or how long she'd be gone, but those weren't at all unsettling questions because there was one thing I was sure of:  She'd be back.

Fall chilled into winter, which in turn melted into spring, and then summer came around. There becomes a certain, indistinguishable point where you stop watching the door and the windows, or listening for that phantom phone ring. There just becomes a certain point once your expectations become flat and lifeless, like a tire with a small leak, and you realize that all of the wishing on stars and the pennies thrown into fountains—all those silent wishes over the candles on birthday cakes? They aren't ever going to explain why the things that you love go missing. Or why they don't return.

Those first couple of months—when the unalleviated days and nights were defined by her obvious absence and the silence of the telephone—seemed unbearable.But somehow, the two of us managed to move on with our lives, fitting ourselves into the spaces where everything was shattered, left to our own to devices to cope with a loss we never could have imagined could even exist in the first place.

Before we knew it though, we stopped simply going through the motions of each day, and started living in them. Call it whatever you want, fight or flight, the process of moving on. I like to think of it like that tortuously hopeless love song you play after a first heartbreak: The first few times you hear it, it cuts through your veins, the haunting melody capturing you, paralyzing you in the short time span somewhere between the beginning and end of a sad, sad song. Then, after you've played it a million times, memorized it by heart, there comes a point where the words combined with the chords that used to sever your composure only sounds like a melancholy song; a ghostly melody of that first heartbreak that made the cut that now claims your scars.

It was more than a year later that we heard word from her. But by then, she was already an old song playing on the record player: On the surface, the melody was still haunting, but in reality, it was just background music. Spinning, spinning dissonantly,  leaving nothing but silence crackling in its wake.

I used to think that my Mom leaving would be that one defining thing in my life, you know? I mean, a father leaving is practically a beaten-to-death trope exhausted by years of unlucky in-love female protagonists, but mothers? They were supposed to be maternal and solid and present. They weren't supposed to be gone. So yeah, I'd say that's pretty fucking defining. But that was before Lana brought that gun into THS.

That was before she shot Michael Augustine dead, a bullet lodged into the deepest part of his chest.