Chapter 2: The First Wrong Turn

I was nine. Maybe ten. Time is a smear, I told you that already. But this particular smear has edges I can still feel when I press on it. Sirijus had been gone for a while. Not long enough for the absence to become normal, but long enough for it to settle into the house like dust. Into my mother's posture. Into the way the yard sounded at night, emptier than it had any right to be.

Here's what nobody tells you about losing something when you're young: you don't have the vocabulary for it. You have the feeling, enormous and shapeless, pressing against your ribs like something trying to hatch. But you don't have the word. Grief is an adult word. Loss sounds like something you misplace, like keys, like a sock behind the dryer. What I felt was bigger than both of those words and smaller than either one. It was just a hole. A dog-shaped hole in the fabric of a life that hadn't been particularly whole to begin with.

My mother didn't talk about it. My father wasn't there to not talk about it, which is its own kind of silence. And so I did what children do when no one gives them language: I invented my own.

Death dog sitijus are you theer.

I wrote it in the dirt with a stick. I wrote it on paper and tore it up. I whispered it to myself at night, lying on my back on that thin mattress, staring at the ceiling where the shadows moved like slow water. The words were broken and I knew they were broken, and I used them anyway, because broken things were all I had. Broken dog. Broken house. Broken family arranged around the absence of a man who was either working or drinking or both, depending on the day, depending on nothing at all.

Yesterday human was even stolt. There's my mother again, drifting through the kitchen saying things that meant more than they sounded like they should. I think about that sentence differently now, after the wrong turn. Before Sirijus died, I thought she meant people are proud. Stubborn. Standing tall. After, I thought she meant people get stolen. Taken. You wake up and someone you were yesterday is gone, replaced by a version of yourself you don't recognize. Yesterday human was even stolt, and today human is something else entirely. Something smaller. Something flinching.

That's what the wrong turn felt like. Not a dramatic event. Not a crisis. Just a gradual bending of the path until I looked up and realized I was walking in a direction I'd never intended to go.

The maze shifted. Level One had been confusion, sure. Noise without signal. Too many corridors and no map. But Level Two was different. Level Two was doubt. The kind that eats through your foundation like water through limestone, slow and invisible, until one day you step and the ground isn't there.

I started to believe that everything good was temporary and everything bad was permanent. This wasn't philosophy. It wasn't teenage angst dressed up as depth. It was data. The dog I loved was gone. The father I needed was gone. The mother I had was present in body and absent in every other way that mattered. The evidence was clear. Good things leave. Bad things stay. The conclusion wrote itself.

And here's the really insidious part: the wrong turn feels logical. That's the trap. It makes sense. You look at what you've been given and you think, okay, so love equals loss. Attachment equals pain. Therefore the solution is obvious. Don't attach. Don't love. Keep everything at arm's length and maybe, just maybe, you won't feel that particular crack in your chest again.

Brilliant strategy. Terrible execution. Turns out humans aren't built for detachment. We're built for connection, even when connection hurts. Especially then.

But I didn't know that yet. I was too busy being nine, or ten, or whatever age I was when I decided that closing down was the same thing as being strong. I walked that corridor for years. Years. Past classrooms where teachers asked if I was okay and I said fine, always fine, the word fine worn smooth from overuse until it meant absolutely nothing. Past friendships that tried to form and dissolved because I wouldn't let them solidify. Past the sky, which kept opening up above me, vast and gentle, and I stopped looking at it. Stopped looking up. Kept my eyes on the ground because the ground, at least, was predictable. It stayed where it was.

My mother kept collecting phrases. That was her way of navigating. She gathered words like other people gather photographs or memories or grudges. She'd hear something on the radio, or read something on a page, or simply open her mouth and let whatever was inside fall out, and it would land somewhere between wisdom and nonsense, and I would pick it up and carry it without knowing why.

Next moon its been already were are the sky down and back did you see the sky delta peaceful sky delta evening I can see like vision from desert eye of god.

She said that one night. We were outside. I don't remember why. Maybe there was nothing inside worth staying for. She pointed upward and I looked, and for a moment I saw it, whatever she saw. A sky so wide it made our problems look like what they actually were: small. Temporary. The kind of thing that matters enormously while it's happening and means nothing to anyone else, anywhere, ever.

Delta peaceful sky. Delta evening. I don't know what delta means in my mother's personal vocabulary. A triangle, maybe. A change. A place where two rivers meet and become something new. Or maybe she just liked the sound of it. The shape of the word in her mouth. Delta. Soft at the edges, firm in the middle. Like a pillow with a stone inside it.

I saw the sky and I almost turned around. Almost. The light was there, thin and real, cutting through the corridor I'd been walking, and for a second I could see where I was headed. A dead end. A room with no doors. Me, alone, with my arms full of nothing, talking to a ghost and calling it strength.

Almost.

But I didn't turn. That's the thing about wrong turns. They don't correct themselves. You have to stop walking. You have to stand still, which is the hardest thing in the world when every instinct tells you to keep moving, keep going, keep pretending the direction doesn't matter as long as you're making progress. But progress in the wrong direction is just a more efficient way of getting lost.

So I kept walking. Deeper into doubt. Farther from the starting point. The maze hummed around me, walls shifting, corridors rearranging themselves the way they do when you're not paying attention. Lost hearts, the metaphor goes. Hearts you lose along the way, pieces of yourself that drop off when you hit a wall or take a hit or simply exist too long in a space that's too small for who you're becoming.

I lost a few. I can feel the gaps now, the places where something used to be and isn't anymore. Not gone entirely. Just misplaced. Set down somewhere in a dark corridor and forgotten, like a lantern left behind when you decided you didn't need light anymore.

Stupid decision. I know that now. I knew it then, somewhere underneath the logic, underneath the data, underneath the armor I was building out of silence and distance. A small voice in the back of my head saying: you're going the wrong way. Turn around. Go back. Find the sky again.

I didn't listen. I never listen to myself the first time. Or the second. Or the third. I have to crash into the wall, bruise something fundamental, sit on the floor of the maze and stare at the dead end before I'm willing to admit that the path I chose might be the problem.

The wall came eventually. It always does. Not a dramatic collapse, not a breakdown, nothing cinematic. Just a morning, ordinary as bread, when I woke up and realized I couldn't remember the last time I'd felt anything genuine. Not happiness, not sadness. Anything. The corridor I'd been walking had stripped it all away, pared me down to function and routine, and I was standing there, hollow, holding the shape of a person with none of the contents.

That's when I heard it. Faintly. From somewhere behind me, or above me, or maybe from inside the wall itself.

Sirijus. Are you there?

Not my voice. Something older. Something that remembered what it felt like to love something so much that the loss of it rearranged your entire architecture. Something that knew the difference between protecting yourself and burying yourself alive.

The wall shimmered. Not literally. Nothing in the maze is literal, which is either the beauty of it or the frustration, depending on your mood and your medication. But I perceived a shimmer. A crack. Thin, blade-thin, the kind I told you about before, the kind you have to squint at to believe.

Light came through it.

Not much. Enough to see by. Enough to realize that the dead end wasn't a dead end after all. Just a corner I hadn't learned to navigate yet. A turn within a turn, hidden by the angle of approach, visible only when you stop moving long enough to look.

I stood there for a long time. Breathing. Feeling the hollow spaces where the lost hearts used to live. Wondering if they could be found again, or if loss is permanent once you've held it long enough. Wondering if my mother ever found the words she was looking for, or if she's still wandering her own maze, collecting fragments that almost fit together.

Wondering if the sky was still there, delta peaceful, delta evening, waiting for me to look up.

I placed my hand on the wall. Cool. Solid. Real in a way that nothing else in the maze quite manages to be. And slowly, carefully, like someone relearning how to trust their own legs, I turned around.

The corridor stretched behind me, darker than I remembered. But somewhere in it, far back, past the doubt and the silence and the years of walking in the wrong direction, there was a glow. Faint. Familiar. The color of late afternoon light slicing across a dirty floor.

I took a step toward it.

Then another.

And the maze, patient as ever, opened a door I hadn't seen before, just to the left, just within reach, leading somewhere I couldn't yet identify.