I think what they forget to tell you when your parents decide they don't love each other anymore is that no matter how many times they swear they aren't broken the vacancy in their eyes will send a different tale and
"we'll pick up the pieces of this broken home" will ring with the consistency of metronomes.
When the dark shadow walks into your mothers room at night and she swears that it will brush up the shambles of ripped up hearts and dollar bills from rotting wood floors and perhaps "help get my head back where it belongs, and we won't have to go weeks with no hot water anymore!"
When they felt the clanking in their chest halt and waves of past due after past due after empty canisters used to drown past due lay about in my nursery after past due after the simultaneous flinch as hands brushed reaching for dishes in cold water after past due.
They never told me.
That when at a cross roads leading into oblivion came about my wonder of carnivals would turn into split homes, split cars, new moms, new dads, never speaking out when it happens within the strike of a lightening bolt that came down and electrocuted my world before I had any concept of what to do with it.
I was never informed that balloon animals would become "you're a spoiled ******* brat" and that fifteen years later the spoiled brat in me was just a little girl reaching out for her mothers hand to ask her for a second "what happened to dad?"
Just to ask her to take one moment to forget about evenings we spent lighting candles in place of light bulbs and keeping warm by the oven and to address
What they never told me.
Why they were moving in new bed sets while my so deemed "alternate life" sat on his couch drinking the same empty vessels from the long fights and the past dues and the empty cavities where hearts once lie.
Why I went from child to Cinderella and next thing you know I had two kids by eleven and you were out building his fortress while I rest my head on dungeon floors night after night after night.
When past due became brand new and next thing you know we're in a new world with a new life and I watched you lose sight of past due, of you.
And for a second did you ever stop and tell me that you'd end up with your will trapped within a tornado of "I'm speaking" and "You're clueless anyways" and that maybe you escaped the clutches of sleeping in back seats at the expense of yourself?
That maybe your only sacrifice would be my only sense of solace?
They. Did. Not. Tell. Me.
That I would be screaming into a void inches away from leaping out of my own skin at one final attempt to bare my still shattered, unknowing, uninformed heart stuck in the first fight of the last night that I saw my parents kiss.
That mister brand new would take the old you and throw it in this dumpster that held baby dolls and sundresses for not even long enough to rid them of their tags.
That maybe the ship has sailed.
They didn't tell me my own heart would be shredded on the floor of a divorce court.