TW: Depictions of implied fatphobia and suppressed mental health issues are included in this story. If such topics may trigger you, skip this story and I’ll see you in my other works here.
Intoxication comes not in the form of dried-up bottles and alcohol residue, but rather accumulates in the blood, poisoned. Which carries the hidden line of imperfection covered by her skin of pale expectations. In our bloodline thrums the trauma which brings the fluid in, and out goes the air we breathe.
She is intoxicated by liquor and screams. She shouts truths with vomit engulfed breath. Rubbing at her back is a younger cousin who finds her sorrow jarring yet beautiful; noteworthy. The cousin hoists her up so she can puke it all out: her insides, herself worth, and her hurt. Fingers going through damp hair, the AC is blasting; cool and loud yet somehow it hasn’t muffled her cruel honesty as it usually does in the aged house.
Never mind that she is a breadwinner, or a bar exam topnotcher. Never mind that she is her own woman, celebrating her success in a fleeting night of tanduay and hard drunk players. Never mind that she is considered strong and brave and funny and kind and confident.
All they see are the chubby fingers and growing thighs spurted from years of lockdown. All they see are the endless food she consumes in one sitting. They: as in family, they as in father, mother, tito, tita, lolo, lola. They: as in the people who time and time again strip away the composure of her self-confidence. And all she does is take; she takes it all in. She takes these all with narrow eyes, witty jokes and passing smiles.
So, when the facade breaks — it shatters, and it shatters hard. As though a glass dropping; drunken and dead weight against the backdrop of a late weekend night. It screeches like never before. Slams against the hardwood floor with a bang of words never heard before — not until it breaks, No.
Not until it is so broken and drained and intoxicated will it scream its fury; unfiltered and raw. Why persecute a fed up being? Why scream louder than her broken voice? Why fault a battered body?
Do not question the resentment, face the consequence.
Face her.
Face the daughter you’ve claimed to raise.
Tell the world; why is she severed?
At 21, wasted like all her impending potential. This toxicity, this intoxication taints our family in wicked addictions passed along generations. The younger cousin watches the whole night. Restless and she laughs out a cry. She cannot defend her drunk relative; not yet at least.
A slap, a cry, a laugh, all goes by. Tomorrow morning, she will not remember her musings. Tomorrow she will be the same, obedient daughter. Who exclaims proudly of her father and surname. Intoxicated, drunken, and buried. Wrapped in blankets and sweat. Somehow, she is convinced she is the problem. Sleepily, as her tired mother hugs her drunk daughter, softly with a voice that still slurs, she says.
“I’m sorry. I’ll be a good girl again.”
Afterword
This piece is dear to me, as it is inspired by a similar incident that had happened recently. Though the story morphed into a prose leaning towards the fiction category, I hope I have conveyed the story as a real and conscious experience happening to a lot of perfectionist daughters.
I dedicate this work to all the women who felt as though they have reached the highest heights of their career, yet somehow, there is always something to comment about our physical appearance. Family is the smallest unit of society, yet the most complex as well. So, I dedicate this work to the daughters who were raised in an Asian household, who were taught to honor family and only family.
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2024, Jafiyah
