mother's violent hand

this one is about how i still love my abuser

The act of breathing is strenuous and painful. Smoke filters through my lungs, punctuating the silence as I stare at her photograph. The wisps caressing me like how she used to when she would realize her mistake of striking me. The book I am reading is settled on the corner of this single bed, pages opened to underlined passages. In it, I had read of the love a son holds for his mother and of the convolution that drapes it. His mother awfully reminds me of my own. Who to me is now no less than a stranger, a passer-by in my large life—a photograph I stare at. There are periods of time up to months where I will forget her name, her birthday, her laugh, her demeanour. Yet, I remember the wrinkles of her hands and the frequency of her rage. I remember the way her eyes used to look at me with this certain dissatisfaction she had. So deeply rooted it would have been an impossible task to unearth. I carry this memory of her with me everywhere. And when I look in the mirror—those goddamn eyes—they stare back at me. The same eyes everyone notices about me first. Those big, fuck me eyes that stop someone in the street. How do I tell them that these are the same eyes I’m afraid to look into? It fractures something deep inside me when I look at my reflection in a passing car, in a dirty puddle, or in the window of a shop. I see her everywhere.

I mourned the loss of my mother before I had even lost her. I mourned the loss of the concept of a mother before I understood what a mother was. But sometimes, I’ll think of the way she used to hug me after her episodes, how she would cradle me back and forth, her eyebrows scrunched in resentment for herself. This is when I am reminded that she was a mother in moments. She was a mother in fragments. She was never thy mother but she was a mother—sometimes.

Maybe she loved me the only way she knew how. Maybe she held a certain resentment towards me because I was a reflection of everything she was not, despite our similar faces. Big eyes that can see through a person’s disposition, a nose with skin that hangs off the tip, cheekbones so defined it resists the fat on the face, mouth so big the tiny flaps of lips aren’t enough. Self-loathing creatures beget self-loathing creatures and that might be the only other thread tethering me to her. How I describe myself is how I describe her. And sometimes she was a beauty but now I can’t help but see everything that was ugly.

I pray to the God that she believes in, that she never comes across anything I write. For none of it would help her. Her resentment for herself would only grow and I don’t want to see the look on her face mirror mine when she realizes how painful it was to live in a burning house. Yet, I hope she knows. She needs to know how much pain I swallowed in teaspoons that now weigh me down in pounds.

This will be my last letter to her.

Dear [Retracted],

I miss you. Do you think of me sometimes?

I’m staring at your photograph that looks so much like me it’s uncanny. I’m crying fat, ugly tears. In the cracking of my ribs and the dislocation of my bones, you felt my love for you, didn’t you? Every day, I realize how much more incapable I am becoming of understanding the word love. Why couldn’t it have been simpler? Why couldn’t there be one constant definition to this foreign word that plagues my tongue, making it heavy and bold?

Is it the distance that makes my fading image of you grow fonder? I think I forget how I don’t remember when the first time it was that you laid your hands on me. For all of my adolescence that is all I can remember. The claps of thunder and strikes of lightning. The terrifying onslaught of rain and slippery falls in puddles. An umbrella catching the bone in my face as it dragged me away.

Once, you had hit me so hard my head swung back like a pendulum, and I slammed into the wall, a painful ache resounding in my bones. I sat there like a wilting tree, caving in to the filth of your feet. I remember letting my fingers grip onto your toes, my head bowing down to your brutality. You carved and harvested the marrow of my love because you needed it to go on, and I split myself open to make it easier for you. You said you were God’s hand, teaching me humility, and I continuously thanked you.

The first time I told someone; you looked at me with pain in your eyes as if it was a betrayal. You cut vegetables for dinner like nothing had happened, hands shaking with fear. We both knew that you were never going to lay those hands on me again. Did the thought of your child incarcerating you, scare you?

You picked at my velvet flesh until only a crust remained. I’m not soft. Not anymore. Are you happy? The years of screaming, of constant ache in my muscles, and the pounding of my fears have succumbed me to a mere shell of the person I was. Now, I revel in the pain and the grotesque because my entire skin is scabbed over from constant slashes and bruises, I am a walking blister on the verge of bursting. And the funny thing is that, this is where I find the softness, in the painful squeeze of the metaphorical noose.

I don’t remember you anymore. But I miss you—until I remember your final act of violence. You threw me in front of you and he hit me instead. That violence will ricochet off the walls for time come. It will continue hitting the walls, echoing, reminding you of what you have done. Put your ear to the wall and you will hear me weeping. Does it echo in your ears until you close your eyes and lose semblance of reality? Does it lull you to sleep on nights you struggle alone? Is this the monster or the mother acting? Or is this the moment when I realize that I cannot differentiate between the monster and the mother? That you both are reflections of love and hate, blood and bruise, white and black, yin and yang except there is nothing spiritual about you. Nothing at all. God didn’t make you in his image, your own mother did.

In the depth of the night like a whale calling, I clutch my pillow closely when it thunders, quietly whispering, mother. Calling out for someone who cannot hear me, for someone who does not exist. For someone who wouldn’t be comforting me through these night terrors but acting as a voyeur to my pain. I still search for your hands in strangers. I still flinch at ‘I love you’ and loud noises. And yet, I wait for you in the dark, sitting on the patio. The cigarettes burn out with every evening, the beer bottles pile up next to the trash, father yells louder with each slam of the backyard door. The skin of my scabs is peeling, and I wish you would be here to tell me that coating it in saliva heals it faster, because that’s how you took care of me after you beat me.

If you ever read this, I hope you sit in my grief. Gag on it. For I realize love is a rot that lingers. Something for both of us to cradle between our ribs. Mine cracked and yours intact. And think of me sometimes, if only to remember what those hands did and what they left behind.

The wake is over, and grief is hitting my body all at once, and then slowly. Like a poison, I lose you in my memories, in my physicality. Except, you see me walking on our old street. You squint at me in that brief second our eyes meet as you drive by. Something unfolds in that second. I feel my heart closing in on itself as you drive away. I imagine you saying, I’m sorry. I remember you saying, fuck you.

May your hands, empty of tenderness, know what it means to reach and find nothing,

Your daughter

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