mother, mom, ma | d.fyodor/o.dazai

1. Rest well, mom.

trigger warnings: explicit details of suicide (by hanging).

The Reader's ability is based on a book by British author. I'm not going to say which one it is until later. ;)

—

"CRACKS ARE BEGINNING TO OPEN."

Something happened to mom when you were eleven.

You could remember it vividly like the monsters within the childhood darkness. The faithful image had branded itself beyond the watery jelly of your eyes, past the fragile retina, and back into the optic nerve, where nobody, even yourself, ever managed to graze with what you saw.

Nothing had affected you that deeply after that.

At least, not yet. Were you supposed to look past what mask people put upfront? Watch as people fought bitterly with their mask and the division of the self? Might as well watch Frankenstein and his creature fight it out. The answer is that the creation, the monster, our inner, deepest desires, would triumph. (Or was that yet another gift mom would give you? Had the monstrosity of your mom's sin cut you so deep that you could no longer turn a blind eye at the front people intentionally put up?)

You had come home from a light-hearted day of primary school, swinging your lunchbox in your hand as you called out her title.

You had gotten silence as a response; though when your voice reached the master bedroom, something collided into it. Like a low thwump—You could remember it, for it had been similar to the noise of a jab being thrown against a limp punching bag.

The lunchbox plastic cracked open when you dropped it.

The police had crowded the house. Ambulances with their heavy blankets, stretchers, red alarms; thus lead to the neighbours bustling out of their own houses, some still wearing their work uniforms while others were messily pulling their robes over their pyjamas before being overwhelmed with nauseating horror at the sight before them. Some tutted with their arms crossed. Others sighed at the sight of the abandoned child left behind, cooing and bringing false maternal warmth in the forms of hugs and embraces.

Gingerly, lifting the strangled corpse from the cut noose, they let the softness of the stretcher entrench her—no more but the mere shadow of her face were you given when they had flared out a white blanket over her body. But you could still feel the singeing halo of red around her neck, the strain from her budging eyes, the twisted mouth, the torn fingernails; as though there was still a sliver of life within her that stretched against the pentacles of her suicide.

Desperation in wanting her daughter at the face of death. That love is not warm—it is vicious enough to cut you down to the very bone.

You sit there, dazed, legs hanging limply from the ambulance, with the workers desperately trying to press a water cup into your hands. Although four hours had passed since the crushing sense of loss, comparable only to the vulnerability of a flower's swelling genitalia once it had bloomed, you were already beginning to feel a scorching sense of hunger for the reality of your Mother.

You begin to tremble.

The sweltering, suffocating summer exacerbated the tightness of your chest—it felt like you were taking tangible mouthfuls of hot air as opposed to small puffs. The shape of death, decay, destruction, melting into the soft walls of your mouth, sinking deep into your chest, refusing to be still.

The death of your mom had opened a strange portal to your life. Much like a worm gripping the sides of an apple and sliding inside. You could feel something move inside of you, long and centipedal, infecting the small handfuls of organs your little body carried around.  You could feel it, within your flesh, like a water-borne parasite, multiplying in the ridges of your spine and curling around the delicate bones. It holds on within you whenever you forgot how a certain shadow on mom's face looked like, or when you forgot how mom's voice sounded like when she had a common cold; like a finger or a hand of some sort, prodding at the fluttering heart and crushing the lungs with its tendril-fingers.

In the orphanage, where you had measured the perimeters of your former room within your mind, you build a blinding utopia of your warm, well-occupied room, where your hand was enclasped with another; you dream of her: Your mom, with her elegant neck, with her drool-less chin, with the scent of her lily-of-the-valley perfume fluttering into your skin like a sheer veil, the softness of her smile like a mask of multiple silky plies.

You do not cry because of the horrific image that she had bestowed before you. You are crying because she is inside you now, as a faint memory, like the air that inhabits one for a second; unnoticed but necessary for life. And thus, how do you love something that does not exist in one place? It is like trying to keep water floating, as opposed to finding its own level.

You cry because the love you have for mom gathers in tears, you choke because it forms a lump in your throat.

You wish for death because it has begun to change you in ways you cannot see but only feel, like an eight-legged monster blanketed in the dark.

In the deep folds of sleep, you cry into your pillow. This loneliness was not quenched by the illusion of mom projected in the insides of your black, screaming skull.