I hate the heat. It’s everywhere. It’s like I have a second skin. Today I cut my finger around the rim of a sausage’s tin can. I wanted to recycle it. I usually scatter them around my flat to use as ash trays or for coins. But I took the wound personally so I chucked that tin in the rubbish where it rightly belongs.
I think my mother is dying. It’s been more than a year since I last saw her and decided I wanted nothing to do with her anymore. It’s been liberating. It still is. But the other day I visited her facebook profile and saw her updates of being in the hospital again. I tried to shake my insides of any emotion and even now I’m a little surprised at how heartless I am. What little duty I have towards her can be summed up by the medical insurance I gave her as my dependent. That’s it. Oh and the loan she asked for last month. Bit weird. Wonder what I need to do to make myself feel something. I don’t even care if I won’t ever see that chunk of money again. I’d gladly give her some more if it would keep her away from me.
I keep thinking about the entry she had posted about motherhood (after her pictures in the hospital) and how painful it is. It’s like something a mother would write after her child had died. Then I think about our last conversation when I finally, for the first time of my three decades of living, I managed to open up about my feelings. It was triggered by some lousy comment she had about my being not good-looking, more in passing really, like it always was. I will not write about everything that went on that day. Just that I sat there, while we ate the meal I paid for, and listened to her go on and on, about her relatives, about her neighbours, about her marriage (my conversational participation usually just involved timely nods and murmurs of assent) until that one comment. I remember feeling I’ve had enough and it was like I was a dam that broke and all my guts went flying out. After a life of living in silence, there I was, pulling thorns and knives from my body and throwing them back at her. It was momentous; I felt vicious triumph to see her tears, knowing they were my tears, to see her silenced, knowing it reflected my silence through the years. And I was shocked that it shocked her. All I kept thinking afterwards was, what did you expect?
I knew then as I left her and my stepfather who had just got back from his trip, that that would probably be the last time I would see them. It did not leave me scarless. It wrecked my life for some time to the point that I had to leave my old job. And again, after a couple of months when my stepfather sent me a single message telling me he could never forgive me for what I had done. I then found out that our little event had sunk her into depression and she had been crying almost everyday. It struck me as odd and little unfair. Then again… they had no idea I’ve been depressed since I was a teenager. Most likely they have just seen me as sullen, quiet and distant. I have handled it quite well seeing as I’m still alive and able to manage a job and a relationship. I guess I have to understand that it’s not the same for others. I have been so sad my whole life that I have learned to be in love with my sadness. What waves I have just been surfing along might have been a tsunami for her. A part of me holds some pity for her, but a rather larger part remains indifferent, the part that would just tell her what I tell myself on a daily basis: just deal with it.
It comes and it goes that little demon of mine. When it arrives, it feels like a shadow that’s been sneaking behind me, slowly invading my peripheral vision until it just consumes me for days when I can hardly get out of bed, during my commute in buses when tears would suddenly run down my face, in front of my computer at work when I would run for the washroom and sink down on the cold tiles to surrender myself to a full howling episode, clutching at my chest because that’s what it feels like - getting stabbed over and over, wondering why I’m feeling such for no reason, then seeing thirty years’ worth of pain replaying in my mind, then forcing myself to think I just have to let it pass until the last hiccup. Just cry it out then go back out there because after all, it’s business as usual.
See, I scorn at them now, those little episodes but I do fear the time they’ll start again. Bit odd that I didn’t go through one during this quarantine. I just feel peaceful. Maybe it’s the strength of my mind at convincing myself that I can’t succumb to the enemy because I basically won’t be able to afford it if I allowed a full takeover. Those therapies, those meds, those bills I wouldn’t be able to pay. Maybe it’s just the endless patience of my boyfriend who usually gets the brunt of my awful moods. Or maybe it’s just that I have finally accepted that my mother and I are dead to each other.
Loading comments...