Fault

There is an ink stain on the painfully precise calligraphy of my life. The predetermined path is covered in smudges and blotchy color that has seeped through the flimsy paper. Sometimes, when the wind blows a little too hard, the pages fly out the notebook. My mother collects them one by one, painstakingly slow, numbering and fixing and gluing until everything is just right again.

Sometimes I cry until I cannot breathe, until I feel as though I’m underwater, the air thick and painful around me, brutal and choking. Sometimes I shake and bite into the flesh of my arm to keep myself quiet, and my mother holds me through it, arms around me in an iron grip as she rocks us back and forth.

Sometimes I hate my mother. I am an angry child, a resentful daughter. I am a terrible person. My mother quietly cowers and nods along to whatever my father says, my mother defends me until he turns on her, and then all thoughts of my defense are disregarded. She protects me enough to say so, to look me in the eye and tell me “all your life I have protected you” when her protection has amounted to nothing.

Mother, you have never loved me beyond the places you must.

But I do not blame her. There is an angry man in our house, he smiles at me and tells us he loves us, he tells me I am his worst mistake, he holds my hand and brushes my hair back from my face as I am hunched over a thick physics textbook, he looks me in the eye and tells me that no other thing has ever caused him as much pain as my existence, he chides me, “stand up straight, with confidence”, he tells me to drown myself in a river of shame, he cuts me fruit and brings them to me as I work, he beats me until my lip has split and all I can taste is coppery blood. Mother, I do not blame you for being scared, I am scared, too. I will love you for your everything, and despite your nothing.

I scramble around on my knees, searching for scraps of affection and disregarding the bad bad ugly, piecing it together, mismatched patches woven into a tapestry as I try to salvage us, a mixture of what is, what was, and what could never be. Mother I have worn your face as a mask. I pretend I am you, but stronger, better. I lend you my strengths outside, but I am as weak as you on the inside. Inside this house built of too many stones and not enough windows, I cower, too, just like you.

I tuck my chin on my mother’s shoulder, and we both pretend that we will be okay.