Her depression was terminal. I remember hearing it before it really hit. Lacing a soft sigh to no one in the kitchen on the morning of my seventh birthday. That was six months after dad died. It wasn't really there in the entirety I know it today, but it was flirting with her, with the idea of her consumption. I suppose it'd be logical to assume the depression was there from the day we put him in the ground, but it wasn't. I became an expert at spotting the difference. There was anguish, and there was pain - but only sadness behind them. It was temporary, and it was safe.
At first she would cry all the time. Weeping at the dinner table, the salt of the gravy welcoming home their cousins found in her tears. Or howling into the darkness, a pillow muffling her screams. A soft cotton hand to replace the callus one that used to banish the moisture from her hot cheeks. No beating heart beneath the cloth, just downy feathers and a wash instruction tag. Do not tumble dry. Cold cycle only.
It wasn't even when the shrieking stopped that I first knew she was finite. Back then I still clung to the hope of repair. I suppose it'd be logical to assume that pain is preferable to death but it isn't. I suppose If something is in pain then at least it's alive, and at least there's the ability to feel left within it. And in her begging I could sense fight. But then came the silence. It was tortuous, even more so than the anguish because at least in the face of horror we're equipped from experience, we know how to make a cup of tea and slap on a warm consoling smile. Even though I was young I was still learned enough to know how to battle misery. But in the silence there was something else, something new, something unnatural.
The tears spilled from her eyes without provocation at awkward and frequent intervals throughout the days, it seemed like she didn't even know they were there anymore. She'd reach an absent hand up to scratch her face and be alarmed by the liquid her fingers met. She'd stare at her moist tips with bewilderment in her frown, as if inquiring how they came to be that way. I suppose she just didn't know the extent of her trauma. Like when a victim is pulled from a crash unaware that they're hurt while their blood and organs are spilling onto the pavement in cascades of crimson like a grotesque waterfall. I suppose It'd be logical to assume that then all it takes is to look down, to lock eyes onto your throbbing intestine, to know you're injured but with her injuries the wounds were hidden. Phantom pains lost within a heart made vacuous by confusion and despair. There was no band aid for her. No antibiotic.
This continued for a while, this bizarre juxtaposition; a woman seemingly healing, but a body betraying her lies, exhibiting her torment. I suppose it would have been logical to assume she was doomed but I couldn't accept this dysphoria as my own. Not me. Not yet.
But then came the final nail in the coffin she'd spent months building. Months of solo DIY all precisely aimed at this event; she smiled. Just a brief grin, beginning one morning and lasting one day. I arrived downstairs to the smell of bacon and saw her, skipping around pan in hand with a sundress i'd long forgotten existed draped around her body. I watched her and in my youthful innocence I was relieved. To have my mother back, it was such a thing of beauty. I cherished each second she looked at me, naively ignoring the emptiness trapped within the stare. She was lucid, but she was lost. But without the grotesque hands of despair I couldn't recognize the danger. It was as if corroded fingers were previously latched onto her irises and without them I could see the blue again. That was enough for me, so deprived of happiness as I was. We merged into a family again that day, laughing like we used to before the stroke - before dad. We washed the dishes and cleaned the house, I was so ecstatic to have her again that I didn't even protest to the busy work. I soldiered on making sure every dish was sparkling, every surface wiped. She kept saying 'it all has to be clean, it all has to be clean'; I didn't care why. It was difficult to care about anything that day - because she was back. I fell asleep with fantasies of the happier years ahead, things returning somewhat to normality within our depleted family. I suppose it would have been logical to assume that no one can heal that quickly. But I was a child. I was alone. And I was terrified.
But then came the final nail in the coffin she'd spent months building. Months of solo DIY all precisely aimed at this event; she smiled. Just a brief grin, beginning one morning and lasting one day. I arrived downstairs to the smell of bacon and saw her, skipping around pan in hand with a sundress i'd long forgotten existed draped around her body. I watched her and in my youthful innocence I was relieved. To have my mother back, it was such a thing of beauty. I cherished each second she looked at me, naively ignoring the emptiness trapped within the stare. She was lucid, but she was lost. But without the grotesque hands of despair I couldn't recognize the danger. It was as if corroded fingers were previously latched onto her irises and without them I could see the blue again. That was enough for me, so deprived of happiness as I was. We merged into a family again that day, laughing like we used to before the stroke - before dad. We washed the dishes and cleaned the house, I was so ecstatic to have her again that I didn't even protest to the busy work. I soldiered on making sure every dish was sparkling, every surface wiped. She kept saying 'it all has to be clean, it all has to be clean'; I didn't care why. It was difficult to care about anything that day - because she was back. I fell asleep with fantasies of the happier years ahead, things returning somewhat to normality within our depleted family. I suppose it would have been logical to assume that no one can heal that quickly. But I was a child. I was alone. And I was terrified.
I woke in the night with my bladder screaming to be emptied so I scurried to the bathroom. When I entered my foot met a heavy liquid. I could feel the cool ceramic tiles underneath, made colder by the substance coating them. I reached for the light but when i pulled down on the slowly swinging string no illumination occurred. I stumbled forward through more moisture of the same consistency, making splashes as I maneuvered, feeling satisified with every ripple like a toddler at play amongst an october rain. I rubbed my bleary eyes trying to locate the toilet in the abyss. Then suddenly my footing slipped and I fell. Scrabbling to get up from the wet floor I reached for the rim of the bath tub. But something else met my grasp. Rising shakily my gaze fell on the bath, illuminated by the shy rays of ethereal moonlight playfully peeking through the cloud, there she was. My mother. Nude. Surrounded by a slowly coagulating pool of her own wasted blood. The smile she'd held all day still breathing across her face. I remember my first thought when I saw her.It was compulsive and I will always be ashamed for it. I wondered who would take me to school in the morning with her occupied in this manner. I couldn't avert my eyes from her, as banal necessities and responsibilities filled my mind, they stayed locked to the gaping slashes cut sideways through the creases that her elbows made. As they wouldn't move I closed them, instead picturing sunday mornings as an infant, flailing among the bubbles as she flanneled me down. I couldn't bear to open them, to see her lifeless face mock me with it's reality, to have the sinister red stain my memories of her. So I didn't. I sank to the floor, my hands and feet meeting the damp, and began to crawl back towards what I thought was the door. But I collided with a wall almost immediately. I stayed there, curling myself inwards towards the corner I had met, my back to the horror.I stayed there for 36 hours. I suppose it would have been logical to get up, to move, to remove the clothes covered in the dead blood of my grieving mother, to clean myself of each drop of her, to continue my life, to take myself to school, to go to college, to meet a girl, to fall in love, to live. But i'm still there in my head. Because I couldn't. I just couldn't move.
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