How Far Will You Go to Belong to Someone?

When all you want is to be someone’s daughter

Today, I’m revisiting an essay I wrote years ago that no one read. Hopefully, some folks will read it.

My mother & I, my baptism at 5.

1.

You set your clothes on fire. It feels good, you think, watching what you’ve bought burn. Fire reminds you of when you were small, and your mother would comb out tumbleweed clumps of your hair and torch them in a glass ashtray. Watching the black forest cinder blue, you’d ask her if this is what skin smells like. She would snuff out the flames with her thumb and forefinger and shrug.

Here you are at half-life, still writing your way back to the flash of a woman you once thought you knew. She is bone-white, naked as paper, and sometimes when you dream you ask her if she knows what she’s done. You tell her she is a wound you’ll spend your whole life dressing, and what was the point of living, really, when you can forever feel the hurt of her — even after they nailed shut the box she was buried in. I can’t go on; I’ll go on. Sometimes you look in the mirror to remember what she looked like.

Hers was a love that bared its own form of violence. Show me your teeth.

You sit in the closet, door shut and in the dark, because it’s home to you. Locked door, nailed coffin, same difference — we’re both at home in the confinements of our choosing. Box that body in, seal off the air, and let that breath slip gently — easy, easy — into the cold night.

Everyone is tired of you, the story of you, the shapes you take and abandon. And in this you agree with the world — you are tired of you, too. You pull at your hair from the root. Split at the end, half-formed atoms, you sit in your box with a lighter and smell the gas as your hair coils and burns.

Before they pressed her eyes shut and waxed up her face, did she call out to you? Firstborn, the experiment went wrong — you were the graft that didn’t take. You sleep through the day and wake at night to hear her whisper that she’s waiting for you. We’ll give it another go in the better place, she says, you and me. Everything to her was a battle waged. In life, she gathered her armaments and staged her platoons. In the war that was she and you, you acquiesced to defeat when her final breath shuttered out. Your body became a white flag waving defeat.

People tell you that it’s good that you’ve moved on, that you’re writing something that isn’t about her. But there goes Persephone clawing ashore, pulling you in and under.

2.

They watched your performance, the suicide striptease — They gave me Valium. I can barely see — and they tapped and clicked away from you. They’ve seen and heard it before, but there was a time when they’d pause to issue their concern entreaties. Your sadness carried the weight of gold — you were once worth something. You were a referral, a recommendation, a connector of people. But this? This is entirely too much for them to bear. They’re forced to watch you weep into your pinhole camera again? They paid good money for your triumphant comeback — you promised them betterment, and instead, you gave them a woman nearing her best-by date, scribbling her goodbyes across her face. What are we going to do with all that disappointment?

Now you’re white noise, the one of many muted. You’ve become sideshow road kill. Look at you, the traveling tragedy, televising your ruin. You’re bruised pavement, a smear of flesh and a cut of bone. The worms crawl into your gaped-wide mouth, making a home in you. Sewn shut, peat-covered hair, cadaver blue, you realize how quickly they’ll forget you. Nothing to see here, folks. But what about all the pills I took; I can barely see. I have a hundred still in safekeeping. Call it the key that fits in the locked box. No air resides in here.

Rest assured, everyone, there’s nothing to see.

You’ve been clumsy with your life. Bottles always breaking, shards of glass caught in your hair and feet. All you wanted was that shine advertised in infomercials and on late-night TV, even if it was for a little while.

Your mother warned you of this — that you’d spend your life proving your worth only to discover what she and the crowd knew all along — you’re a folded hand, chips left on the table. The mother in Carrie is taunting, they’re all going to laugh at you. But still, they elbow their way in to witness the gold-plated brick singed to a shriek. The men hover with rods above your mouth. Rusted hooks on your ripped lip while the women ransack your remains. When the cameras come, they swan their way into the frame and speak highly of you. They shake their heads and say they wish they had known and you kick the black and white television in the afterlife — they’re not hip to cable or technology here — and scream: I kept telling you.

3.

The man you once considered your father tells you a story about a prized mare, Lucky Lady. In her prime, the jockeys rode her hard at Preakness, Belmont, and Kentucky. Lucky Lady was a three-time Triple Crown winner. Then one day she bucked and fell in the paddock, and her value shifted from prized thoroughbred to a Bonbon-chewing foal factory. She had her share of stallions, and then there was the million-dollar stillborn. And this was when things got a little dicey. Lucky Lady’s owners weren’t in the business of keeping expensive, barren pets. She had given them the very thing that was hers — her legs, her body — and in return, they injected her with fluid until she fell into a permanent sleep. The man you used to call your father tells you that there always comes a time when someone’s costs exceed their value.

It’s business. And you cry loud and often because Lady probably wanted a life of chewing on apples and grass, fucking in the field, and galloping in the sun.

4.

You used to think her hair was a tangled nest of telephone wires — a means to call out. You just had to find the power switch. You called and called. Bring me back to when I was 10, and there was love here, in this house. When bodies on the beach burned copper and we were a ticker tape of white. We poked and touched our skin. We’re X-Rays! Film negatives! Never had it occurred to you that you were content with being parts incomplete. Or that you bonded over the fact that your skin gave others the impression you were dying.

But you were 10, and there was love in this house. It was here, right here, you could’ve sworn… you distinctly remember…

All you wanted was to be someone’s daughter.

Her hair was never a mess of wires, only nooses. Hundreds of them.

5.

You like the rain because it wipes everything clean. Today it comes down in sheets and you sit in front of your window and take in the show. Few things make you happy these days but rain is one of them. You delete apps from your phone, one by one, because it hurts when you shout out your pain to hear deafening silence. You prefer being alone, but lately, you’re lonely and everyone shirks the burden of knowing you. So you imagine icy Norwegian landscapes, an ink sky, a tiny house. The reverie comforts you during your waking hours and sleep feels like one long coming attractions on a loop. So you sew your mouth shut and tweet the safe things. You respond to emails with exclamation points and smiling faces — everything is fine! — you give the crowd what they want.

Make no mistake. They’ve already bought tickets to your comeback tour. They bemoan social media’s lack of realness but neglect to mention they’re the ones perpetuating it. Who’s liking the bodies in sepia? Who’s fawning over the walls awash in blush pink? Who’s scrolling past the uncomfortable posts about pain? Who’s muting and whispering her again? Make no mistake. Their whispers are louder than bombs. They never wanted your before or during, they only want to feast on the carcass that’s your after.

Look here, friends. We’ve finally got something to see.