My Mom Said

My mom said, “Why are you crying?”

The world is sweet and dark and my eyes are closed within my bed. My bed is my skin, it smells like my mothers chest. I see her skin tags and wrinkles and tug them and suddenly they are my landscape. My world is her skin, her lines are memorized in my body memory. In my memory I see my smallness in comparison to her. I see how sacred our difference was. I’ve grown up and now, our equalness is mundane. Childhood has become a sensory deprivation dome. I go there in the small parts of my life, and it illuminates the big parts of my life. It is unending. Elongating my meaning like the hair of my mother. Her hair never seemed to grow. My mother’s contagious pain.

She laid drunk in my bed and slapped my face in continuous waves. I cried into her arms and asked her to stop hitting me.

“I’m not hitting you”, she responded and slurred her words.

“Why are you crying?” She asked me.

She laughed at me as if I was laughing back. As if we were adults in conversation. Dancing over something we were both in on. 

Another adult came in and tried to cheer me up, but he had drunk too much as well.

He sang a song about pee trickling down onto my head. I slept in a bunk bed, Ella above me, pretending to pee on my head. They laughed and I remember being conscious about forcing myself to laugh, as my mother laid upon me, like a fish forgotten by a fisherman that wanted to be caught badly.

There was a secret drawer at the top of her dresser. I found what I now know is a pipe and I suspected something private would happen with the object. I saw the holes, the tube, the cavity that transported something. It was spoonish yet holey and I couldn’t imagine just what it could be useful for. I played with it in my hands and felt frustrated that I couldn’t get to the bottom of it. It’s so far gone, this memory of being unable to understand something so obvious now. All that is unfamiliar to me is now big and expanding, like death and jobs. But then, when I was small, the confusion was everywhere. They could be bought and consumed. I miss being afraid of what confused me, instead of the current glaze my eyes cast over tortured people and objects. I watch people smoke crack on the train and I hold my breath in case of a second hand high, but I do not question it in the way a child does. Confusion was the sign of care. Now it is known and sad, and I care but I don’t ask questions. We walk away, life is shedding and less sacred than it used to be.

*

Her father killed a raccoon with his bare hands in the ocean. He held its head under the water and waited until its body stopped seizing. I wonder how he felt permission to do this, if he ever did feel justified in doing so. If he looked over his shoulder as he killed it, worried about the tourists looking onto the local, killing a thing in public. 

He was a hypocrite. Her father voted for the better of the people, not for the better of the rich. He was slow living. He wanted good things, but maybe only for himself. She thought about her father as one thinks about seasons. How they have favorites and not so favorites. She missed how he was when he was warm, he was quiet and fighting in private, like a dying bear. He was guilty but acted innocent and gained sympathy as big men do, when they are visible with certain amounts and sides of pain. But secretly, his daughter saw his pain as clearly as possible. There was no lens of adoration or hatred. It was plain as a boring day, as unspecial and insignificant as all other pain. 

He lumped together gulps in his throat like war wounds. He acted as if he were amputated and the head of a veteran parade. The glory that surrounded him wasn’t honest and it was very bright. He ate at it like sandwiches from a tired hand. I think of him as being forever babysat by strangers, a man like this is never in real danger and forever a danger to others.

Her mother resented his comfort fiercely and loudly. And as much as they came to hate one another, they were very similar. They acted as a mirror of ugliness that keeps punching itself, smashing glass into its knuckles. Her mother played songs loudly and drunkenly in the kitchen. Her father sat in his own rage like it smelt luxurious. He waited to decide how to punish her. With his hands in front of his face, and his legs propped starkly against the ground. He was sure his violence was justified. What a loud bitch she was. She was violent too, it seemed others forgot, her father thought. He’d strike her as if the invisible eyes were turned off in his presence. He’d forget his violence because her steps were quicker and far more in frequency. She’d move around him like a debt that couldn’t stop growing. He’d ignore the calls, the begging to pay back what had been spent too quickly and outrageously.

The unabashed violence persists. The violence he would commit against animals and wives, it's a shared language, like grief. They feel entitled to their rage, because to them it is not rage. I wish to create a haven around the world of unashamed violence. I wish to make it a ball and send it off to another universe. To catapult into silence. Into the unknown that no one knows of anymore, not even remaining a confusion.

*

Adult suffering is much more similar to a book rather than the actual act of suffering. It is stationary and confined, a begging history. The memory of being a child and being in pain keeps it in its category. I beg my mother to be kind, to be affected by the world, and to be radicalized into a greater joy rather than a much more solitary, stagnant, dark pain. 

When the house was sold strangers wiped down our heights off the walls and I saw through the front door. It was new and white everywhere, how I imagine the hospital room where I was born. Where I became true, rather than a thing my mother craved. She craved me to make her real. What a dangerous job, to make someone real. One is bound to fail. Always, always failing.

 I wish the light in those walls, the one that bounced off of the paint could eat me whole. It was always round, like my old life. I wish it absolved my small toes into its loving face and took me there, that place I always suspected was real and always around the corner. The forgiveness of my imagination lulls me. Like dreams, I see my imagination as inarguable. It is a story that happens to me continuously. I am made up of what is real and totally not real. 

I listen to my mother’s favorite musicians on the bus. My body looks as if its dancing but its being thrown around by the cracks in the street. I lean against my neighbor, slightly, so she suspects its by accident. I need a hug, from a woman older than me, who smells like her, who is similar in her laughter. She shines towards me in her light and I disappear.