Sliding
There’s an echo in my brain that hears her threaten to kill us all as she pulls out in front of a semi on a Georgia highway. There’s an ache in my chest that feels the tightness of the seatbelt webbing eat at my skin as I scream for her to stop the car. A simple argument turned into attempted homicide, a crime that carries the potential of 10 years in prison. Here, my mother is 42-years-old, but this crisis comes not in the middle of her life, but instead, the end. There is nothing to lose whether we survive this crash or not. It oozes desperation to take command over a life that spirals out of control.
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My mother’s manicured nails tell a story of put-together-ness, but the truth of it is in her appendages, her body. Fingers merely bone with loose skin, her wedding band slides off, worn down after 22 years of tumultuous, holy matrimony. Her hands are porcelain white intersected by blue-river veins that poke out, a map for the blind. Her skin hangs loosely over her body like a pasty kimono, signs of rapid weight loss. She buys clothes from the children’s section of Wal-Mart because real women don’t come in sizes that small. Her hair is a pretty straw blonde, falling in loose waves down to her bottom. The top few inches are drenched in oil, unable to leave the bed to shower, fearful she’ll lose her breath in the few steps it takes to cross the room. She wears the same outfit for a week, and the mattress carries an indent of eight years of life within four walls.
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My mother gave birth to me. While this is the basic biological assumption my friends make, my mother reminds me of this during all of our arguments. I brought you into this world; I can take you out of it.
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I find comfort in icebreakers that ask what is your biggest fear? It is the only question for which I have a clear answer—sliding. In my recurring dreams, I am sliding off a ship. Sinking like the unsinkable Titanic, I am dodging large, brown wooden crates carrying personal belongings and memories. The crates come so close to my face I can see the dark brown waves of radial lines and knots etched in the grain. These lines carry time with them, something I desperately feel I am running out of. I grab the smooth metal railing but still I slide; yet I wake up before I face the reality of death. I awake dizzy and disturbed.
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My mother loves genealogy. Like constellations, she connects the star-crossed lovers and long-lost children and tries to make something of the beautiful mess of people that had a hand in her existence. She once spent $100 on an online test that would determine her cultural heritage. She swabbed her cheeks and placed the cotton swab in an envelope, sealing it with more of her DNA. It came back with a list of continents and subsequent races that sat dormant in her bloodstream—Caucasian, Asian, Black. She deemed herself Caublasian like a hybrid scientific experiment of God’s own design. She thinks she is an original, but she is just like all the other women to come before her. I have no misconceptions about being original; I know I am just like my mother.
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The silver Chrysler Pacifica came to a stop in-between two sets of handicapped parking spaces at a Marathon in Georgia. There was no need for propriety in a time of mental deterioration. The last family trip in the foreseeable future, my mother hoped to make the drive from Florida to Indiana in one long stretch to combat the nausea building in the depths of her stomach. The leather of the car interior pressed against my cheek as I pretended to sleep through the growing decibel levels of their quarrel. My mother was cranky, deprived of her medication so she could drive lucid. I tuned out their voices, and felt the lurching of the car and my stomach. Tires squealed in rebellion to the shock of quick traction as my mother ripped the car from its parking spaces and spun back to the interstate. She didn’t stop to look to her left before recklessly entering highway traffic. Her eyes blaze with something unfamiliar as she screams I’m going to kill us all.
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In truth, it is the things I am sliding into that worry me most. I worry about sliding into the legacy, into the illness, into the apathy.
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The saying the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree made me feel as if my mother was inescapable. I stop to remind myself that I am not my mother. If the apple didn’t fall far from the tree, it’s because the tree wasn’t willing to throw the apple out into the world and let it be its own. Instead, I imagine we are two negatively charged magnets; exact copies that push against each other and never come together. I find solace in this space of resistance.
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My sister reaches frantically for my hand and they collide in the madness. We scream and cry, begging her to stop. I try to appeal to her senses, asking her not to kill us. What kind of mother kills her own family? I think of all the mothers in history, the ones who killed their children to protect them from the evils of the world, but my mother is the only malevolent force in this moment; my mother is not my savior. In this moment, I realize that being the vehicle for my existence did not mean I owed her my life. The blare of a semi horn awakens something in my mother and she swings the car to the left, slamming my head into glass; I will have a concussion for eight weeks. In this moment, we are sliding, but to the safety of another gas station parking lot on the opposite side of the highway. The feeling of sliding keeps me reeling for weeks. In my dreams, I slide without end.
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My mother and I look a lot alike. Some would say, we even look like twins. She is beautiful, but she is volatile. Some days I wonder if the similarity stops at beautiful, or continues to that space of unpredictability. I spend quiet moments wondering if some days I slide into another personality, one given to me at birth, bound to my mother’s outbursts and bad love affair with pushing people away.
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What is your biggest fear? they ask.
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Sliding.