I Didn’t Want to Talk About It

I don’t think I was a cruel kid.

But I did one cruel thing.

I was maybe five or six, at someone’s house — a neighbor, or church friend, or some random gathering of people who didn’t quite know each other well enough to leave their children unsupervised…but did anyway. Girl Scouts, maybe.

There was a girl there. A little younger than me. Maybe three or four. Blonde, delicate, wearing a frilly dress with some kind of animal on it — a bunny or a bear, I don’t remember.

What I do remember is that I didn’t like her.

Not for anything she did.

Just for existing.

For being soft and small and unruined. For the way her mother looked at her. For the easy way she fit into the world — like she belonged there.

I waited until no one else was looking.

Then I grabbed her hair and pulled.

Hard.

Not a childish tug. A full yank. The kind that whiplashes your neck and summons instant tears.

She screamed. I let go.

And when the adults came running, I stood there, stone-faced and wide-eyed.

“What happened?” I asked, as if I didn’t know.

As if I wasn’t already learning how to lie better than most grown-ups.

They believed me.

I don’t think I ever did anything like that again. Not once.

But I still think about it — not the action, but the impulse.

The moment something cracked open inside me and let the dark in.

It wasn’t about that girl.

It wasn’t even about her mother.

It was Wanda.

Wanda who shrieked when she didn’t get her way and somehow always got it anyway.

Wanda who slithered into the space where my mother should’ve been and filled it with counterfeit care.

It’s not about them. It’s the Wanda in them.

Too loud. Too favored. Too safe.

I was four when my mother died.

And no one told me how to grieve.

No one told me it was okay to scream.

So I didn’t.

Instead, I learned how to swallow fire.

How to fold myself into someone tolerable.

And when the heat had nowhere left to go, it found the softest thing in the room and yanked its hair.

I don’t excuse it.

I just understand it now.

Grief doesn’t always look like tears.

Sometimes it looks like a five-year-old, standing in a stranger’s living room, doing something cruel and quiet because everything else was taken from her.

We all have a crack somewhere.

Some of us just grow into the shape of it.

I didn’t want to talk about it.

But I think I just did.

Sometimes I wonder what my mother felt in that final second — if she even had time to feel it.

But I think I know.

I would die for you.

Not just words. Not just instinct.

A truth so deep it rewrote everything.

She didn’t think.

She moved.

And there’s nothing I could ever do to repay her except live.