ERNIE AND ERNESTINA: Searching

Book Two, Chapter 210: Big Progress

It’s the twenty-fifth of July, nearly twenty months after Ernie died.

It’s hot — too hot to sleep on a pallet atop the living room’s tribal rug — so I go into the bedroom to sleep atop a blanket on the double bed, under the breeze of a ceiling fan. I don’t like to feel hot. It reminds me of the feeling of shame.

My hair is Peter Pan short. People tell me it suits me. I feel freer. I feel more like me.

Joshua winced when he first saw me with this short hair, and I think Ernie would wince, too, but I like it. It captures both the child in me and the growing sense of me.

The lessening of fear and shame. A growing sense of self. Sleeping on the bed Ernie and I shared for the first time since he died.

This is Big Progress.