skullcrusher

how to make a slav from scratch (an extensive secret family recipe)

my mother never stopped smoking while pregnant. the butt would kiss her thin, pink lips while a steamy gray found its place in her scarlet blood. her lungs were black and rotting, but the inside of the womb was even darker. so what? we're a different breed in our nation, we've got rakija and song in our veins: — mom knows plenty of people who've been smoking since adolescence and they're well into their seventies — what doesn't kill us, we talk about over a drink at noon. and the thing about that is, it never matters if you're pretty on the inside. what kind of a person your kid grows up to be is none of anyone's business. go to a good school. stay in your hometown. marry well. so what if you don't marry happy? it doesn't matter if you feel like you've been choking on life since the day you were born. you're the picture of your mother in her youth. do you not think she was choking? do you not think she hates you because she hates herself? but, something else — i could smell the smoke when i was born. it never left the first floor. my bedroom was the attic before i turned twelve. it was always what the living room smelled like after my parents' card game nights. no amount of airing the house out will change that it sticks to your hair. i remember, like it was yesterday. i hated cigarettes. i hoped my mother would die from cancer. i hoped my dad would come to his senses. he started smoking when i learned how to multiply. when the renovations are over, i'll stop, he would say, but the renovations had ended years ago, and i've seen him with a cigarette in his mouth more often than without. and my mother never stopped smoking while pregnant. she's been smoking since before she met my father. he was someone's friend. she was the blonde girl with the tobacco taste on her lips at the night club, but, before that, she was the girl every parent would wish for. beautiful girl with raven locks and pale, freckled skin. top of the class. the perfect sister. the perfect friend. i wonder, sometimes, if she ever even changed. if she was a bit like me. if she would let everyone praise her at the dinner table with a polite smile on her face, but then light one the next day on school break. my mother never stopped smoking while pregnant, and i was born with something insatiable. i know the cycle goes on. i know i can't pry out the broken pieces of the woman who made me out. i feel like a 21st century victor frankenstein when the bathroom lights get so yellow theyre green and im using the toilet bowl as an ashtray to watch the smoke float out the window into the black silent night. i feel like his creation when the water is running and im using the toilet bowl for something else. i have to kill that person — i built the creature, out of my own dead parts — before he kills me, right? its a matter of time before we stop thinking of each other as one of the same. you want something, so you indulge. you miss your emptiness, so you purge. there is a war within me. there has been from the start. but i won't be my mother, even if i can't escape her. i made my monster what he is. it's not his fault. he was a child. he does not deserve to die for doing all he knows how to do. at night i feel like a venn's diagram of the rational and irrational mind, when the blue lights keep me too awake to sleep and too asleep to think. CLICK to forget! CLICK to remind! in ancient greece i would have been a prophet. my dreams tell me not to hold the hand of my demise, and what else is there to do? yes, i built the creature, out of my own dead parts. he was born awful, he was born a mistake, the way i was born an addict. and fear not, apollon, i still have the one hand to pull out the knife. CLICK to show more! CLICK to show less! CLICK to hide! CLICK TO hide! CLICK to— i used to tell myself i could never be a smoker. but i guess it doesn't matter so much. at this point, i can only hurt myself. i could never parent a child. i fear my creation. my monster is the part of me that starves to reopen the hole i try to fill. my mother never stopped smoking while pregnant. my being is the shape of an ashtray. i think she feared me, too. i think you cannot love what you have birthed until you can love the way you've been. and can you? so i will never parent a child, because i already raised myself, and perhaps it wasn't mama's fault i turned out with a vortex in the pit of my stomach. i was always hungry, but who starved me first? i filled the hole with everything, and then nothing, and then seawater, and then smoke. i turned out talking about the victor and the adam within me, like anyone understands what i'm trying to say. do you think mary shelley hated her mother? do you think i hate mine? i will end her bloodline. i will kill her monsters before they can be mine again. you get that, right? you get that you're your own failed project? big deal, your mother failed you first. you're grown now. live with the want in you. live with the withdrawal for something you never had. there was nicotine in my blood before i first cried. i'm scared any child of mine would inherit my love for the macabre, and the sad, and the empty, and nonsensical prose. you are what you make, aren't you? am i the thirsty wraith i have been indulging within me?
or is that my mom? or am i the indulgence? or did circumstance break me? or did my mom not care i would come out broken?