Beasts.

The door thumps like there is a raging beast behind it, and tonight there is. In a matter of moments she morphed into something else, a hunched animal, all claws and screams and wild, brute force. She picks words as big as boulders and hurls them as hard as she can. We duck and dodge. We shut the door and hold it shut. We try to tame the beast, but despite having birthed the beast ourselves, we are no beast-tamers. THIS ISN'T TEACHING ME ANYTHING roars the beast and we try on our smallest, most useless voices. Calm and quiet, we remind her, but she can't hear us over her screams, or she chooses not to. PLEASE I'LL DO ANYTHING I'LL DO ANYTHING I'LL CALM DOWN IF YOU'LL OPEN THE DOOR. But we can't unlock the door because we have already told her she has to calm down first. That she needs to do this. For herself. Because it's a skill she should have by now, to reverse the onset of the beast. To bring herself back to normal.

Later, the reverse. She's curled into a small ball in her bed, burrowed under the blankets. She's talking in the smallest of voices, and hers is particularly useful. I'm afraid I won't be a good parent because my parents aren't teaching me the right things, she says. I wish I was a different person, she says. I wish I could be a calm person, she says.

I wish I was never born, she says.

I wish I could say I knew what words to say then. That they were right there in my pocket the whole time. That they were hiding behind my ear like a shiny coin. Instead of the tired goodbye. Instead of shutting the door.

You have to be in this world, I would have said, because what would the world do without you? Magic, I would say, is all around you. I would say: You are the very existence of magic.

I would say: You are everything.

I would say: We are all beasts, sometimes.