Keep Your Visions to Yourself
- Dec 5, 2025
- 2 min read
by Kathryn Kulpa
We crossed the line on Friendship Street. Didn’t see the stop sign. Failed to yield.
Once we shared the backseat. Trusted someone would always be there to drive. The auxiliary parents: your dad, my mom. They were unemployed, sometimes, or their jobs didn’t matter. They had time for our foolishness. We dangled bare feet out the window, toes dancing in the wash of exhaust-scented highway air. Our goal was to disrupt, to provoke, and if we saw disapproval on the face of a properly-dressed middle-aged driver, so much the better. We high-fived. Sang along with Stevie. Stand back, stand back! Nothing would stand in our way. Our wild hearts. Our crystal visions.
We met in preschool storytime, though neither of us remembered it. That was the origin story they told, our auxiliary parents: my mom, your dad. You threw a board book at me. I stole your Lego. Our fates were sealed.
We wanted a world full of drama and magic. Held seances in basements, planted mysterious clues under loose boards in buildings, made fake flyers for parties that weren’t going to happen and left them under windshield wipers on parked cars. We wanted lightning to strike. Butterflies to burst thick as smoke from a cloven tree, white doves to transform into ravens. We were blindsided by the drama we never expected, our families living in each other’s pockets as we did.
Your dad. My mom. Suddenly we just found each other, my mom said. But when had they ever been lost?
Once we lived for sleepovers, wore each other’s clothes with glee, shared red apples bite by bite. Why was forced sharing less sweet? Weekends at the condo our auxiliary parents bought, the small bedroom divided like Berlin before the wall came down. Shared custody. My side, your side. We even shared a landline phone, see-through plastic so all the guts showed through. Like that phone, our secrets spilled out, exposed to the world. When Eric Milhoffer called me to talk about our school project and I sank down behind my twin bed, winding the phone cord around my wrist, you sat on your bed, doing your nails, rolling your eyes.
“He has a girlfriend, you know,” you said when I hung up. “But I guess the women in your family don’t care about things like that.”
Apples gone brown, sucked dry by worms. Even your dad’s old car with the wide, boaty backseat we loved. We watched them tow it away after the accident, words of blame already beginning to fly. A total loss, the insurance man said, as if we hadn’t already done our own accounting. You can go your own way, the song told us. And we did.
Kathryn Kulpa really should go to bed now, but instead she’s submitting this story. Sources say she does this quite often.
