Mother

“And even after all this time, you’ve got to find it in yourself to love this life. Even after bad haircuts and flu season and nights spent staring at the blurry turn of the ceiling fan, half-drunk and wondering what the point is. Even after your third slice of cold pizza and bug bites and pink eye. Hangnails, selfish sex, that little smudge on the mirror that never goes away. Even alone. Even in love. Even worse. The world, your mother used to tell you, is not your oyster. What she meant was, the world, too, is hard to love. Just like you. And even still. Even now, with all your carefully built walls caving in. Icy sidewalks lined with hungry people. Hopeless eyes. Empty hands open wide. Here’s the truth: she doesn’t love you back. Or maybe it’s him. Shaggy-haired smart ass. He’s too far away to touch you the way you want. Even then. Even when the bananas rot away. Brown and lined with fruit flies. It’s been a year since your grandmother died, and the kitchen still smells like the butterscotch candy she used to make each Christmas. She never got around to teaching you how to make it for yourself. Even so. Look up at the stars every once in a while. Watch how they flicker like the headlights on the highway behind your childhood home. Promise you’ll try to see this life with brand new eyes. A lover whose name you’re only now learning. Even after all this time. Forgive her sharp edges. She, too, is doing all she can. She, too, deserves a chance at reinvention.”

“I don’t quite know how we’ve ended up here. How we’ve ended up as strangers when we used to spend nights staring at one another across the mattress, pointing and counting up quirks like constellations. I knew you loved me when you asked about the small bump beneath my lip that even I’d never noticed. You traced it with your thumb, something soft in those eyes. “Where did it come from?” you asked, like you’d give anything to see me in childhood just to know me more fully. That’s love, isn’t it? Not the sex or sacrifice or small talk you make after years of memorizing one another. It’s the digging, the prying, the eventual release. The discovery of your own uncharted territories. You saw me more clearly than I saw myself, and somehow you still walked away. Back then I thought you loved me so much that even if it crumbled, broke beyond repair, you’d stay. Touch my forgotten scar and sigh. When you left you said, “You’re all I’ve ever known” as if that was reason enough. It’s become blurry now, the certainty that you loved me once. More fresh are the fights, the never-framed photos. The times I prompted you to call me beautiful, begging for crumbs. I wish I could remember the lilt of your voice as you asked me that question. I stare across the mattress all too often. Alone in the dark, I can almost convince myself that you’re still here. I can almost feel you, fingers frozen on my face, so curious and consumed. Both of us barely breathing in wonder, unaware it would be the moment I’d miss most.”