I remember you telling me that once I became a teenager I'd stop telling you things, I'd stop caring for you, that I'd stop loving you and I remember vehemently denying it because it wasn't true.
It still isn't.
And as much as I know that you hope it would be solely because you are my mother, it is not. Neither is it that we'd click if you were a girl of my age, because I don't know what you'd be like if you were born decades before, or what I'd be if you weren't my mother. I can't tell you what it is that makes me love you so, as easily as I can tell you what it isn't.
It isn't because we understand each other fully, because we don't.
It isn't because we're honest to each other, because there's things I haven't told you.
It isn't because we always make each other happy, because I've hurt you.
Funnily, I'd never write this as a twelve year old or a fourteen year old. I write this at seventeen because when I told you at thirteen that I'd still love you when I'm older, I knew you understood me and that you made me happy and that I made sure to tell you everything, but it isn't so now.
Time is a whore, and she takes with her people and things and purity; there are secrets, and regrets, and I can't know what you feel as much you can mine.
And yet, and yet, I deny that I'd stop loving you when I'm older, because it isn't true.
I watched a movie called I Killed My Mother and I'm swimming in a lot of sadness. Hubert says: we should be able to kill ourselves. in our heads. and then be reborn. to be able to talk, look at each other, be together. as if we never met before. And he says this of his mother. He says, he wishes he could reset it all and color the sky differently because somewhere, something went so horribly wrong that now they can't love each other.
And so I thought, is that what family is? Luck? And that the only reason I love you is because things just happened do the right thing at the right time? That it was all chance?
It was an ugly thought and it made me want to cry, so I got rid of it.
It isn't luck.
It isn't any thing that will make me love you and it needn't be any thing. That love and the promise of it can just be. My inability to write it down and to put it into sentences is the emotion and that's all it need be.
Maybe it is something I'll understand definitively when the planet's made a few more trips around the Sun, maybe I never will; but I'm glad it is so. Whatever be the cause, I'm glad that I will love you forever and ever and ever.
"What would you do if I died today?"
"I'd die tomorrow."
-I Killed My Mother (2009) dir. Xavier Dolan
