All the gaping wounds under one starry sky
No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark – Warsan Shire.
Estrange. To be made a stranger. To be separated from. Outward. Foreign. Alien. Before I do it, before I bring myself to cross this bloody river, I think I am going to faint. I am sure I would not survive the separation. But I am barely alive now, too, in this place—it is what I think as I approach the threshold: it cannot get any worse than this. The relationship is already so broken, and our hearts so wounded, that breaking free from it wouldn’t cause any more damage than has already been done. I suppose, instead of breaking away, the truth is, it felt more like putting shears to the stem of a plant, scissors to a dress. I did not want to do it. I did not want it to come to this, but it did, and I had to.
There is a seemingly permanent tethering to motherhood, and I shouldn’t be the one to unfasten the tie. It feels cruel, this kind of severing. Unnatural even. But there I was. It was my hand holding the tool. It was my hand that pressed gently, but firmly, to cut the cord in two. The coming apart of a mother and daughter. A splitting at my own hands. A gushing red. A bridge collapsing, at last.
I shuddered doing it. I could not understand this foreign thing pulsing in me. This new, forceful desire to save myself for the first time, to not give into the suffocation that was taking ground. I knew what was coming: the toxic roots wrapping around my neck, my face, choking me in its tangled hold. All these years, the easiest thing I’ve done in the face of danger has been the most destructive. I stayed in the flames and ran around to see what could be salvaged. I called out to the one who started the fire, hoping they could beat it down, drench me in water, and claim me again. I told myself that the burning is only part of it, the scarred skin, living proof of a love that fights. A love that overcomes everything, even to death. Why I thought the very hands that wound me could heal me, too... Why I thought the very tongue that lashes out in fierce red fury could sooth my cries…
I ask my friend, “Is mothering an instinctive thing? Is it possible that some have to learn it?” Is it as innate as a bird learns to fly on its own or something that can be taught. Like playing an instrument. Like learning to read. Like braiding someone’s hair. You pull a strand and move it here. Twist this way. Careful, not too tight. To learn to love to unimaginable depths. To give yourself over and over to it, to be broken gently, to be undone, to be made anew. To understand the sacredness of tiny hands that cling to you for dear life, and to do everything you can to protect the little life. I don’t tell my friend, but I think it can be learned, which means one does not always know how to do it well, to mother in a way that does not leave everything in ruins. Which also means I can carry the broken pieces in my hands, and look graciously at the one who did the shattering, and love her still while walking away.
Even then, the splitting fractures me, too. The partition is both outward and inward. A line moves right through me, dividing my sense of self. I am my mother’s daughter. I have half a mother, and I am half a daughter. A grotesque reflection stares back at me in the mirror. There are cracks everywhere; if I pass my finger over a line, I know the edges will be sharp, ruthless, and unforgiving. What have I done what have I done what have I done?
I do not wake up knowing how to live in the wake of the aftermath. What does one do when they walk away from someone they love? When they come loose like a thread from a fabric that was never meant to unfurl? What do the first hours of the morning look like? Are you not thinking about them as you open the blinds and reach for a mug to make your tea? Are you not thinking about them as you slip on your shoes and walk out the door? Do they not, quite aggressively and unrelentingly, assault every corner of your mind during every second of the day? You walk through the door and they’re there. You look in the mirror and they’re there, always in your eyes. You stand alone in a room and they’re there with you too. You close your eyes to sleep, and they break over you like a dream. Somehow, they seem more real now that they’re away. Somehow your senses are heightened to them now that you want them gone.
I grieve even though there’s no real death. But you know and I know that this, too, is a kind of death. My body carries the loss like an illness that spreads and when I feel the ache coarse through me, I surrender to it. It is easy that way, to give oneself fully over to a wave. I resist the urge to push down my fears, to harden myself against its current. Love opens and softens. Unravels you tenderly until you have nothing to hide. In love, we come to see ourselves for the first time, too. All that I am is revealed in the light and I do not look away. I see my desperation. I see my rebellion. I see my deepened resentment. I see my childhood of absence, of abandonment, of dark dark terror. A little girl in the woods, left to the wolves. All the gaping wounds under one starry sky.
I would like to learn how to live without the shadows of the past. Without the towering trees of the woods hovering over me. Without the nurture, the watered soil, the seed that never broke the surface of the land. I would like for this body not to inhabit all that dwells within it. All the unspeakable things. I want to lie on a table and give myself to be split wide open. I know what they will find, but I want another’s witnessing. A testimony not of my own telling. Will they see it, too? The dread lining my veins. The trauma hidden in my blood. The soft tissues of neglect. Woven through my rib cage dreams of my mother’s face, her smile, her laughter, her touch, her embrace, her love her love her love. Who will touch the throbbing thing? Who will tell me the song it sings—of return or of endings?
