The Frequency in Which You Destroy Us

A Poetic Prose Response to Prompt Challenge: To Resolve Perhaps Toward Ending

Photo by Volkan Olmez on Unsplash

It is ill-fated blood you carry across your lifespan. It has journeyed with you from utero toward island, and island across far waters, and far waters into beyond — the new and foreign land. It is history and circumstance carved into the crevices that river their way across the landscape of your body. It is your insides, molding crows feet of your eyes and frown lines of your tongue. It is dark dark eating up the blackness of your hair and morphing it into its ghost. Mother, you have become far ill. In your illness, what you touch, you soon destruct, and what you destruct — it is us — your actions collisions of metal and blood and ending. You say it is love, then you destroy and destroy again.

We have let you hurt us because we know you love us. We thought we could withstand the pain because it meant that in it, there was, too, your love. But one of us has left; spiting you, he claimed you know nothing but of hate. Then two decided too, it was time to go and leave; tightening his fists, he said it would be he who decides his fate. Now, I’ve become what is left of three, and I fear it’s become far too late. In my heart, mother, I love you so. To me, you exist across time and space, blurring memories and moments into an enigma beyond what I could ever know. You are mother, who I preserved from before you ever hurt me. And, you are mother, who I recognized long after your damage has been done. I love you with everything that I have. I hate you with everything I can muster. My love and hate are infinity, halves sharing one embryo: they are the very same head; they are the very same tail. It is ill-fated blood that you’ve handed me, a curse to carry across my lifespan.

I did it because I love you, you told me once.

Yes, I said, and in that way, you sealed my fate.

…I have not yet learned how to say goodbye to my mother. I vacillate between fantasies, believing, still, that she could learn to love me, and knowing, too, that she never will. I do not say this with spite. I do not say it because I have little hope. It is, simply, what it is. It is drilled into us that mothers should be mothers, that it is in their coding to love to their children and that it is their instincts to nurture. But this leaves so very little room to consider: fractures, bent by lifetimes over of trauma, circulating through one’s blood, recking havoc and passing on line-by-line, generation and generation to come.

Mothers, very often, give birth to their pain. They nurture it and love it well. Alongside, or sometimes, more than their own children. My mother is one of these mothers. I know this, I understand this, I forgive this. But still, more often than I like, there is a child in me still asking, please, can you love me?

Inspired by: poetry prompt, A Sour Goodbye

Mabuhay, I’m EA and I’m new on Medium. I’ve been here for two months to be exact! Please get to know me, & allow me to get to know you:

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More of good writing!: Cries from Our Forests: Listening to Cristiane Juliao Pankararu