You come home one morning after disappearing ten years earlier in a clutter full of detestation for parents, teenage revolts, and sex, drugs, alcohol; all those things that seem good at the beginning but then bring on the problems faster than an injection of god-knows-what. You knock the front door down and your mother sits at the kitchen table dining on some fiber cereal which you once hated but missed terribly for the last ten years. She is stunned.
‘Where’s dad?’ you ask her, almost knowing the next words that come out of her lips.
But when she finally says it, you don’t. ‘We divorced,’ she says, ‘a year after you ran away.’ Her eyes are petite and wrinkles slit along her jutted cheeks. She seems older than you can ever recall, maybe even older than grandmother when she died.
‘You what?’
‘We are separated. We fought all the time when… once you left…’ She says and the tears are now cutting over her neck. She stands up and runs inside your arms. Then she says you smell like beer and rotten bread and only then do you tell her how much you love her and missed her. When she embraces you, her gentle body trembles on your chest. You sob on her shoulder. ‘Where you been?’ she asks.
‘I went to live in LA for the first five years and then I went on to Tijuana for a year and a half, and then I went to jail for about three years and then I came back to you. It’s been hard on my own but I had some friends who helped me.’
Then she slaps you harshly on both cheeks, and it’s difficult for you to start sobbing again but if you were sober you would so you fake it, and tears come down like bullets. ‘Why’d you leave? You ruined me. You ruined us. Think what could have happened if you haven’t left. You are twenty-six already, unbelievable. Intoxicated to her mother’s house, she hadn’t seen her in ten years. What do you want from me?’
You look around in search of answers but you only see framed pictures of a sixteen year old girl, lean with long blond hair, sitting on a dock next to a sunset ocean or smiling like a model in the midst of London. She is wedged in time. Forever young in her mother’s eyes, now looking like a prostitute, ragged hippie dress and dark circles under cunning crimson eyes.
She ponders at your clothing and slaps you more, three thousand times it seems, until you bawl and fall to your knees. The bag on your shoulder rips open and two broken bottles of booze, syringes, and a couple of pills slip on the marble. Now you’re really in trouble.
You curse her, nasty words you could never say in front of your own mother. She kicks you. Blood spurts from your nose, and then finally you understand what’s happening. Your own mother’s beating you up! You’ve ruined her life! Even worse, you ruined her daughter’s life! She remembers you as a sweet sixteen, lipstick and pink and preppy giggles with girlfriends. Now you are a hobo, drugs blocking the blood into your brain, soon to kill that little flat mind of yours.
Throw up a little on your mother’s shoes. Try to stop her. Terrify her with one of the syringes, kick her in the groin, and pluck her eyes out. Gain a little respect from her. Look what she’s doing to you, your own mother. You are a hopeless case, a bundle of crap twisted on the floor with a mind of garbage.
She murders you, little by little, painfully. Alas she stops striking and punching you and she falls to the floor next to you. She cries. You have your chance to kill her now, the blade is in your pocket, just take it out and stab her at the neck.
But you are too weak, and she grasps your head and salt water from her little almost-plucked eyes descends on your mouth, tongue, yellow teeth. ‘We need to do something about you, my angel. We really do.’
You take the blade and dump it at her, but it curls in the wrong direction and drips full into your arm, your wrist. Throbs stick in your heart, your arm, and suddenly your mother wakes up from your stomach and yells in shock. She calls the ambulance. All the filthy blood, the drugs, the alcohol, the sex, it all escapes from you and you laugh.
Life is fading and suddenly you have the urge to say goodbye to your mother, but she doesn’t listen and she helps the paramedics take you on the ambulance. All the bad blood from within your arteries is dribbling all over. Your heart stops. She cries over your lifeless body.
I am watching you from above, I will send you away to hell, I will make sure nobody ever becomes you. The spilled blood was yours, and I’ll endorse that no more blood will be wasted on revulsion. Once upon a time you escaped the misery of being a child, but the only thing you truly escaped from is your youth.
Say goodbye. It’s all over now. Your mother will bury you and maybe even your dad will come to your funeral. You caused this to yourself. Say goodbye now, it’s too late to whine over spilled blood.
