Hello Goodbye

I wake to a hand pressing down on my mouth.
“You didn’t write.”
I knock the hand aside. “You didn’t write.”
Yorick laughs, far too bitter already at eighteen. “Monitoring our e-mails and cell phones. Classy.”
That does sound like my father. And, now that I’m awake, I realise that Yorick has scaled nine stories to my balcony to talk to me after being dealt weeks of communications blackout.
So this is love.
*
Years later I hang up on my mother, change my number, my e-mail address and my name. My family taught me how to burn bridges: stop writing.