The Mother

I am holding my vigil at your bedside, watching you breathe, your chest rising up and down with the rhythm of my thoughts. The pounding in my head which deepens like the creases of your pillow, burning through me, making this real over and over again.

I’m like a cat, I think, because I get nine lives. Nine chances. Nine doors of opportunity to make this right, to make this what it should have been. I will taste the bitterness of your sorrows forever if only it means that you’ll open your eyes. If only you see me the way I have always wanted to be, way under all the insecurities and fears and pride.

I think of how much I want you to love me. I want you to love me so much that I crumple under the weight; I want you to love me so much that I become blind, deaf, and dumb, succumbing to the overwhelming force of some arbitrary human emotion that we might have possibly made up.

This morning I put my makeup on the way I always have, turning inwards on my face, staring straight into the mirror. I’ve never been afraid of myself. I’ve seen other girls cringing when they spot their imperfections, fidgeting and obsessing, rigid as they wipe away the blots. It’s different, for me, because when I see myself in the mirror I don’t get that self-hate. The taste of my own heart beating is so familiar that it overcomes the strangeness of seeing my skin reflected in the paper white glass, like some imposter who got it all wrong. I touch my cheek now, watching you, wondering if you’d love me the same if I’d been unpainted, imperfectly perfect the only way I know how.

Today is the day, the last day, the first day, the only day that really, truly mattered. The imposter inside me quivers and slips away with every tip of the brush, almost as if the tools of my trade could paint my face into the colors of my soul. As if I can somehow create myself through the layers, so you can see me finally, for who I am.

I am burning all over and I think it’s a fever but probably just fear, because what will I do if this doesn’t work?

Your face is so calm that it breaks my bones. I’m shattering. I’m dreaming of glimmering angel hairs and sloppy seal kisses and your fingers curling around my heart, squeezing so hard that my eyeballs roll and tiny droplets cover the floor, spraying an arc through the air. My hand is trailing over your face, the blood vessels pounding in unison, as if you can finally breathe me in.

I swipe at my face and the real me I painted on so carefully is dripping down, gently burning through all the layers I’d thought I had, until I get to the bottom and there’s nothing there. And even though I want to cry, scream, at the sensation of being nothing, my body revolts against me and there’s just nothing, no sound, no tears, just the fleeting flicker of pain.

I press down, hard, and you wail, your tiny nose strangely squishy under my fingers. Your rosebud mouth curling open and closed like the ocean tides, gathering the decibels of the room. The scream sucks the life out of this room and the cheery light fixtures shudder under the weight as I push and push, trying to extinguish what won’t love me, what won’t see me.

They don’t understand. They’ll never understand what it’s like to watch you breathe without me, watch you smile at anything but me, watch you exist in wake of my emptiness. They’ll never understand how it hurts me to be so close and so far, my fingers touching your skin, prying you open, while your open eyes stay closed. They don’t know. It never should have been this way.

The nurses come in to quiet you, their faces drawn with the lines of yesterday, painted with the shiny false hope I want to destroy. The black haired nurse reaches for you, cooing softly, and I watch as the arm pierces through my stomach, the eerie noise of silence dawning as my hand falls from your face, limp, no longer belonging to me.

There’s a sick remorse that piles up in my stomach, burning the bright acid way pain used to. If I could cut off the hand that tried to extinguish you I would, but neither muscles nor skin nor bony tissues function the way they used to, the way they did when I was still fresh.

"She probably misses her mother," one nurse says. She doesn't see me. She doesn't see how I've tried to destroy you, rip the life from your lungs. She doesn’t see how I tried to claim my baby, too late, clinging to nothing.

"What happened to the mother?" another asks. She picks up your bag, the one I'd picked out. The one that I can no longer pick up.

You stare up at me. For a second I swear you can see me and I cannot even breathe- the black haired nurse whisks you out of my grasp, her arms pulling you through me so that I shudder with the burn of contact, like I was filled with light and then dropped down a cliff so fast only cold could survive. Wait, I think, wait, please wait.

"She died during the birth," the nurse finally answers as they carry you away. Away from me. Away from my last chance.

“Poor thing,” I hear them saying, down the hall. “It must be awful, to be so alone.”

Yes.

“It’ll get better. Tomorrow you’ll be ten days old!” Someone coos. You giggle.

You disappear from my sight as the cold truth hits me again. I’m dead, but now I’m also, finally, empty. My skin melts away.

I didn’t even get to say good-bye.