I Like Haunting You Off Inshore Cove.

When I call my mother we talk about family friends and television and work and novels and never my father. We don’t broach the subject unless I’m the one who brings it up, and even then only in broad strokes. I talk about the effects of the things that happened, the dangling hook but never the line attached. It is impossible to talk about. The word ‘abuse’ hangs between us like a crackle of interference. It is what we don’t talk about that keeps us close. 

I have my father’s teeth and grey eyes and the paternal nose. In my mother, I have her mouth and general face shape. We are the same height, but she has breasts and I’m as flat as a popped tire. My mother hates being photographed, despite being quite pretty. She hates her teeth so she smiles with her lips pressed together. You can feel her hating being seen at all. 

My mother has all the attitudes and habits of a martyr. She works for a non-profit (not the white savior kind, the kind that helps lower-income people do their taxes and sign up for insurance) and never tells me how I should live my life. I know I can write about her because she will do anything I ask of her and nothing I don’t. When I call her, she knows I’m mostly lying by omission. Either she doesn’t want to be nosy or doesn’t care, but I think she just likes to believe the version of my life that doesn’t go on the Internet.

I fake being fine very poorly. I always think I come across as well-adjusted but I never do. It’s what I attribute to my atrocious taste in men. They take me in and take me out; they know I’m not well. They look like bad news; I say yes. I’m always the one who started it. 

My condition is being myself. It’s not life-threatening or even unlivable, just the kind of dull ache that makes most aspects of normalcy nearly impossible to enjoy. Like a colorblind person who insists green is really the most terrible shade of brown and all reds look alike. Large portions of the world, completely unknown to me. I wouldn’t mind so much if everyone would stop telling me how lovely the color green is and how happy I should be about being so young and pretty and lucky. 

Now I go to therapy and cry to a stranger over Google Meet. She hums and says insightful things about Narrative work. 

Every time I think I am out from under the boulder, it comes crashing back with its own expanding gravity. Up the hill again. Another day, another day; I cannot believe the world isn’t ending yet. I am the sun knocked out of its own orbit; Agamemnon, fire, drought. There is no escaping my history, my bones are rotten from the marrow, ill and poisoned from inception. I could never win the game.

We never choose when we are thrust into the world. We emerge from a tomb of unalive-ness which is to say also dead. We are dead and then undead, and then dying; paying rent and shitting and stalking around unable to remember what they ate for breakfast. I couldn’t control the day I was named, so when I go, I’d like to go brutally at a hundred and two. Maybe Dahmer myself or whatever, hold a version of me in my lap and drill a hole into her skull; zombie-fy her with all the violence of a stranger. Watch a body become a body. 

Two nights ago, I dreamt my father came to my birthday party and vomited on the wood floor. We were in my childhood kitchen, the early one, the one that looked out onto the neighbor’s wine shelf. He was thin, like a drug addict, all his handsomeness scrubbed away with age. Rather than coming into his power, my leaving only diminished him. He looked like that the last time I saw him. In real life, he doesn’t show up, he just sends me guilt-ridden voicemails and money transfers whenever I reply to a text. 

When our house was being renovated, I found a scorpion in my shower and one found him in bed. His leg swelled up and my mom drove him to the hospital. I went back to sleep and hoped he would die. Frogs and snakes and scorpions crawling on the heated tile, on the hot tub lip, at the bus stop, school hallways on rainy days; things were looking real biblical for a while. 

I have this theory that my father was abusive because he loved me and hated himself. In hurting me, he linked us forever. He saw in me everything he wasn’t: womanhood, comparable innocence, some other life force that had already been sapped from him that he thought he could reclaim for himself. The greatest secret of my family is that my father would kill my mother for me and my mother would kill herself and I would kill us all if it meant my father would die. I am the killer. 

If not for my father I think I would disappear entirely. Without him, there would be nothing left of me. I have become him. I hope he thinks only of my face when he dies alone. I hope he dries out in the desert, and I hope it’s cancer of the soul. My father is an incurable disease.

Damn everything. Damn you. Damn, damn, damn.