Disclaimer:
This piece is a hybrid of experiences, emotions, metaphors, and borrowed imagery.
It draws from: fragments of my own life,

It is not a literal autobiography, nor a factual depiction of my family.
This piece uses metaphorical language to explore complicated forms of love, not real events.

And maybe love is supposed to be creaky. Like soggy wooden floors in abandoned cabins, reeking with the acrid smell of rot, leaking a yearning for existence. For matter to displace air molecules and take up space. For it to tear into your neglected innards and spill light onto wounds you haven’t named yet. For it to foam the shores of your eyes, shaped like white baneberries, like raindrops, like ovular faucets, threatening to drain over the crown of your nose bridge and converge. 

But never quite. 

Perhaps love is concrete, holding together only because of hydration, because it was born to.  Or is it clay that molds, sculpts, cloys? But in the end it is destined to rupture. 

I look at my mom and realize that love is oxygenating a flame. Protecting it from blizzards and other unnamed ruins, at the cost of your own blackening hands. Soot slowly diffuses into her epithelium, but she shelters it nonetheless; because it is the only luminous thing she ever owned. Her little candelabra, that she treads dimlit corridors with. 

She often tells that I am made of her flesh, a sugarcane’s ratoon. I contemplate, just as often, how biologically wrong she is. I took a lot, borrowed food, oxygen, amniotic fluid, antibodies, home, blood but never flesh. I asked for everything but skin.

And she gave and gave. It is funny how the only thing she proudly claims is not even hers; it was mine all along. 

She could have claimed her genes that colour my eyes cedar, the tiny hole in my abdomen, the eugenic contour of my hips, the chromosomal girth I inherited, but she insisted on skin, my corium. The dress that I wear to hide the decay in my marrow, the yellowing of osteocytes, the decalcifying of my bones. 

I stare at the apple and beetroot juice dad makes me, it's acrid foam slurping its own bubbles. If you look at it from far enough, it looks like blood but I drink it anyway, and think about the burgundy of betalain, the blood adorning the cracks of your lips like kintsugi, the chipped nail paint you bought for 2$.

I wonder when the burgundy stops being red. When does it dissolve into black? When does love become pain? When does life kiss death? I search my wounds for words to paint you. Words that will coalesce into poetry. I find corpuscles, fibrin, hurt, antimatter, decaying skin but no words for you. I guess I vomited them all the day you choked me. 

I don't think you realised what you were doing. Until you did it. You said you just pushed me to the wall; all you wanted to do was lightly clamp my mouth shut. Another thing you loved doing, by the way. As if you could send the body matter back down my throat, as if you could bury me inside my body again, but it's too late mom. 

My innards are on the floor, I have puked and I won't ever regurgitate because I know you love it. You love my semi-digested chyme, splattered on the floor because you love me and you can't do anything about it. No matter how much your adenoids sting due to the stench, you will clean it up regardless, because I am your little candle and your hands are already burned anyway.

When you pulverize my face under your feet, my senses an amalgamation of sweat and skin, I wonder if we are the same creature with two faces. Likes animals that have conjoined bodies. I read somewhere that they self-mutilate to separate. 

I think I understand them. 

I am sometimes crustacean, other times cephalopod. Octopuses have chemotactile sensors on their tentacles,  possessing an autonomic nervous system of their own. Marine biology says that these sensors can taste the prey before it is eaten. Due to having a decentralized brain of their own, separate from the octopus, these tentacles often engage in cannibalistic negotiations over who gets to sharpen its radula and eat the prey. 

You and I are a lot like them. Sampling each other every morning, a tiny ritual of our own, deciding whether the day ends with love or broken knees. Whether our cheeks will be a pretty pink or a fresco of purples. 

Some days when I wake up, I can still smell the citrus of pineapple on me. My body-a mosaic of yellow pulp, ascorbic acid drenches me. It reminds me of May 22, 2018. 

When I saddled onto your summer skin like a pupa refusing to shed its cocoon and we watched married women make questionable choices on TV. 

You said companionship is a compromise. You used to say a lot of things Aristotle would have said if he were a mother to a scummy child made of ribs and sticks and an eternally weak immune system. I thought this is what mothers and daughters are like. 

Bruising, cleansing, feeding and then bruising again.  

These days, when the linen drowns me and sleep seduces my eyelids to shut, I think about what you said. What were you compromising so much for? For a child. Who can't love you without hating you more? Or a child skinning herself to erode what remains of you? 

Mom, I love you but I don't want to be you. Mom, I don't know who I am but I hope it's not you .