Kid Sister and Almond Joys

For the first time in my life, I have a kid sister.

Or it feels like it, at least. I share a room with a young lady ten years my junior. She loves dinosaurs but has a torrid past at the hands of addiction. I feel almost like Donna Hayward in a sense.

She often asks me to go with her to the Walmart and to Dunkin’, she tells me about her work at the café chain where she works as a line cook making sandwiches from cheese bagels with red onions; we wander the aisles for things we don’t need and I inevitably end up buying an Almond Joy and a tube of Revlon lipstick I don’t need.

My sponsor wants me to continue on the IOP track, and my father and I agree with her. A lot of raw emotions are surfacing and re-surfacing which I don’t know how to deal with. All the things I tried to drink away keep bubbling up and the other night I saw Brad Pitt sipping a whiskey and I felt my mouth begin to water.

Someone opened a seam in my heart and now I don’t know how to close it.