HM THEMES

Dear Mom,

I love you. Better to get this out of the way first instead of tacking it on at the end like some sort of footnote or afterthought. You are a mother, after all. You deserve to be a header at the very least. A title shouted in bold capitals. 

I don’t have as much to say to you as I did to Dad. I’m guessing I’ll only need about a sheet of paper to write this out, check for errors, sign my name with a flourish at the end. I am the after thought here. The footnote that became the header. 

When I was a little bit younger I used to kid with you about being a bastard. You and Dad exchanged this look like, “did she really just say that?” And I suppose being a bastard doesn’t mean what it would mean a few hundred years ago. It’s almost trendy now. Babies first, marriage later. But I have to give you your credit, both you and Dad, for being together for as long as you have. It’s clear as day that you drive each other crazy, and when you fight it usually leaves you in tears behind a locked bathroom door, smoking all the hurt out of your lungs. But I know you love each other without question, without too much resentment. I thank you for staying together when everyone else seems to be falling apart. 

How I know this is my home:

Wine in the fridge, always. Cigarettes on the counter, the coffee table, hidden between sofa cushions, slowly killing you. You, turning a deaf ear to my pleas to stop killing yourself with cigarettes. But you’re smart. You fight a war with your body you know you will never win. Ten years, fifteen years. I try to imagine a life without you and my mind can’t fathom what your absence will inevitably mean. I tell myself you’ve got at least five years. Let me get married first. Let me give you a grandchild. Let me graduate from college, Mom. Give me that. You owe it to me, your bastard firstborn. But, Mom? Sometimes I feel more sorry for your lungs. Lungs that have been fighting for breath since you were fourteen. 

I never claimed to be the perfect daughter. I’m bitchy. You yell at me and I yell right back and the first time it caught you off guard because you hadn’t realized until that exact moment that I’m growing up. I think you cried later on, to Dad. I think you both did. But other times I know you’re glad. Happy, even. I will leave the house soon enough. I will perhaps fall in love as swiftly as the seasons change and maybe just as often. I remember once I asked you if the first time hurts as much as everyone says it does and you told me no. I was only ten or eleven at the time, but I knew that you were protecting me with a lie. Maybe even the first lie you ever told me.

So I do the same. I lie to protect you. I lie about the smoking, how it doesn’t bother me that I can’t ever really wash the smell out of my hair, my clothes, how sometimes I feel like I’m living in one of your lungs. I lie and tell you I’m going to a friend’s house when I really just want to be alone and spend a few hours laying out on the hill by the gas station, writing these letters in my head that I will never send, that I will fold up and forget about. 

I know it’s not easy, Mom. I know you raised my brother and I without too much of a complaint, know that Dad is grateful because you made more than him until you lost your job, know you are tired and bored of living this life and that you have realized and come to terms with the fact that you are stuck in this town. But I’ll get out of here for you, Mom. I’ll visit cities and send you postcards and pictures and I will bring bits and pieces of the world with me when I come home. I will shake the lights out of my hair. And I will pretend to need you. I won’t ask you to love me a little less, because I know you love me as much as your lungs will allow. I’ll pour you another glass of wine and we might even share that last cigarette.

August 20th ∙ 65
tagged: prose  personal 
  1. thevictorproject reblogged this from fleurishes
  2. whitekittymilk said: this is lovely. absolutely lovely.
  3. sumosumi said: really really so very beautiful. i’m in awe.
  4. lovelyknots said: you are absolutely incredible.