Garbage Bags

If the world ends in fire, my family will survive. Here’s the truth: after the house burned down, I was restless for twenty moons and filled with more shame than the prosecuted. The guilt was too massive for my eleven-year-old body to carry, but I stored it in the pit of my stomach for five years. We were homeless for about a year, and I want to be clear about what that looked like for a family of four: Black, one parent, and lower middle class.

We stayed in the spare rooms of Mama’s friends, inexpensive hotels, and we made ourselves fit inside the limited space. Our garbage bags of salvaged clothes, family photographs with burnt edges, and the collected donations from the community cramped us in these places. My two siblings and I slept side by side, sharing bed covers swarmed by the lingering smell of smoke and acid. The residue of the fumes was stubborn against the multiple washes.

In the winter, we stayed with Mama’s boyfriend, John. He was an overbearingly tall man with skin as dark as my father’s skin. I never liked him. He came with a daughter around the same age as me, whom I routinely fought with. Mama called it jealousy; my fear of being replaced. One time, after his daughter beat my ass, she cried for me to be her sister.

“I already have one,” I said.

My family only had each other to hold onto. So when Mama learned that John was cheating, she left work early one afternoon and came back to his house. Quietly, because she was on the phone with him, she told my sister and me to pack up all of the garbage bags and put them inside the car. We calmly drove away into uncertainty, with no specific place to stay. She would rather be homeless than underloved.

Here’s the truth: mama never allowed us to cry for too long. The day after our house burned down, I still went to school. Dressed in a men’s navy blue collared shirt we picked up from Dollar General and wearing the same khaki pants as the day before, I sat inside sixth-grade English class, trying to pretend I still had Mindless Behavior posters hung up on my pastel-blue bedroom walls. While Mrs. Johnson ranted about subject-verb agreement, I sat inside that desk visualizing the grease fire that left my home hollow.

Here’s the lie: it wasn’t my fault.

I witnessed my family struggle for years because of my mistake. Time is ruthless. It doesn’t allow me to return to our one-story, four-bedroom home so I can celebrate another birthday in the backyard. It sure as hell doesn’t allow me to tap my younger self’s shoulder and whisper a soft reminder to turn off the gas stove. How does forgiveness work? Because even after I confessed my truth to Mama and my sister, I still feel guilty.

“You kept all that to yourself for five years…Thank you for telling me,” Mama said with her eyes red.

“Give it to me, give me your pain,” pleaded my sister.

When will I stop carrying my body like my head doesn’t belong? The guilt moves me to believe that I’m not deserving of love or forgiveness. Yes, it was a young mistake, but one thousand moons have passed and I, still, carry those garbage bags up on my shallow shoulders.