Carla diaz12/17/2023 Middle school will tear through you painfully but quickly like a stomach flu. You will not find it again until you are a mother yourself, when you can be, when you choose to be, when you are lucky enough that both are the case. Such closeness will vanish from your life slowly, quietly, and without ceremony. Other equally far-fetched realities include the immortal jellyfish, eagles that mate while airborne, sea cucumbers that eat through their feet. This closeness is hard to fathom even though it was yours. “OH MY.” It angers you how there is no peaceful way.Īs a young woman, you will look back on that closeness with skepticism and wonder if it truly existed. Each time you wake her, she is frightened. Snores rattle softly in her throat then grows in volume, revving like a chainsaw. Your mother’s hair smells like sleep the fan spins and wobbles overhead, matches the rhythm of her breathing every eight counts, then falls behind. In that fuzzy space between dreaming and waking, you do not feel your body but know it is being held. Wrapped in a pale yellow sheet, you will dream about depth-how it’s expanding around you always. “Bad for your teeth.” The sky has fallen and somehow she still cares about teeth. You watch, cross-legged on the bed, biting your nails. She walks around at a zombie’s pace, wielding a smoking torch and muttering some Catholic prayer, the only one she knows. She fills the house with plantlife, drinks hot teas-peppermint and kava, and avoids songs in the minor key. The smoke, you think, looks like a person.ĭuring these years, she takes every piece of advice she gets. The smoke contorts in the air like it’s in pain. Sage smoke lingers under the hood of an oversized lamp shade since someone, a bereavement counselor, recommends that people like her burn it in the home. You sleep by her side for thirteen years because she is a patient woman. Your father lives on, in the cabinet and the linoleum, the energy saver light bulbs and the harmonicas. She carries a burden stitched into her brow, into the carpet and curtains. Before the vague there are nights to get through in which you fall asleep in your mother’s bed. This is your youth: a time free from the self-reflexive tendencies of womanhood-when the mind is soft but you do not yet feel vague.
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