One Word

Story features heavy implications of past abuse.

Oftentimes, good advice is easier said than done. You know that you should rinse your dishes after you’re done with them, but sometimes it’s far more convenient to leave them in the sink to “soak.” You’re more than aware that it’s already eight in the morning and that if you want to have a productive day, you really should get up, but those five more minutes of sleep are practically begging you to let your head fall back down into your soft, comfortable pillow. Things like that, though, are almost entirely inconsequential. On a day-to-day basis, yes, being late for work or having a sink overflowing with dishes would be enough to be life-alteringly chaotic. In comparison to cutting off the people who literally made you, however… Well, suffice to say that it pales considerably.

You’ve played this game before, where you stay up for countless hours past midnight, thumbs hovering over your phone’s send button in your text message app. You must have erased the message a thousand times at least, rewritten it one thousand times more. It’s not a nightly habit, per se, but it’s ritualistic enough to have caused you significant sleep deprivation in the past few years. Exhaustion hangs under your eyes now like fat bats in a dark cave. Despite only seeing her every few months, your psychiatrist always comments on how much paler you are from the last time she saw you—how much your demeanor has changed from a happy young adult to somebody who seems occupied and burdened.

It’s not that you don’t have anybody to talk to. You have a loving partner, a therapist. You even have some coworkers who have, on more than one occasion, extended concerns.

“I’m here if you need to talk” is a phrase you’ve heard so often that you’d be rich for every nickel it earned you. “Keep in contact. If anything’s bothering you, you can always talk to me.”

Old habits die hard, you suppose. You were taught long ago to keep your feelings to yourself—they were considered a burden on others.

“Toughen up,” you were told, “or I’ll give you a real reason to cry.”

Maybe, you muse, that’s why you can’t remember the last time you’ve cried. You can feel sad, of course. When you watch sad movies or listen to sad songs, you can feel the sadness there behind one of those warped glass walls. The tears are there somewhere, but like a tendon snapped between muscle and bone, something broke along the way, and now all that’s left are the disjointed remains of feeling and action.

Your phone feels empty in your hands, somehow. Not physically—your cellphone is solid as ever, obviously. You’re tempted to describe it as a spiritual emptiness with how the silent, unmoving message screen feels, but you decide that’s silly. Your partner sleeps heavily next to you, rumbling snores in the midst of their sleep detailing more to you about the quality of their sleep than words could ever. However, your gaze isn’t fixated on the lump in the bedsheets for long as your pupils slowly migrate back to the messaging screen.

How do you speak to someone so determined to never listen? What do you do when the person who was supposed to love you the most doesn’t care that they hurt you? How do you communicate with someone like that? Your text messages from earlier in the day have gone without response, and you know the reason. Your mother has an early bedtime and an early wake time; you’re sure that you’ll hear your phone buzz underneath your pillow soon just as you begin to drift away to sleep.

You have always both understood and never understood your mom, the paradoxical contradiction fueled by both knowing yourself deeply yet barely knowing who you are. As stupid as it sounds, you feel like your mom and you are connected like stars in a constellation—millions of miles apart but so close together. The water in a pond ripples, and when you stare into it, you see your mother. Your souls are intertwined in such a way that you don’t know how to articulate it. How can two people be tied together so closely yet be so vastly different? You’ve seen the good in her—just look at yourself. She obviously raised a good person. What do you do for somebody so lost?

Although you don’t have any recollection of the incident, your mom told you about something that had happened when you were just a baby. Growing up, it had only been the two of you. One time, you had been in the car with her, heading somewhere in the idyllic mountainsides of Tennessee. While passing over a bridge, you apparently gazed out the window toward the water.

“I remember this,” you had said, although perhaps not in those exact words.

“Do you?” your mom had asked, her tone of “You have never been here before” too nuanced for your baby mind to process.

You then described to her how you had been in a car just like right now. Except, you had been the Mommy, and she was the Baby in the passenger seat. You were too young to understand the concept of death, but you detailed to your mom—in baby terms—how the car veered off the bridge and that, in the end, the two of you died, and it had been your fault. Of course, you’d said all of this nonchalantly as well, like it was only common knowledge.

Maybe it’s a bug that your mom’s buried deep in your brain. She’s told you before that you and she were fated to be together as a family. You don’t particularly buy into the theory of having chosen her as your mom when you were a “baby angel” in heaven, but you’ll give her some credit. You feel linked to her through more than just this life, even if you have nothing to evidence it with.

It hurts.

It hurts to love somebody so much, you think. Luckily, you met your partner in high school, so you learned early in life that love wasn’t supposed to be painful. But your love for your mom is complicated and unexplainable to anybody who hasn’t experienced the same thing. People wonder how you can make excuses for somebody so toxic. Somebody who uses their intimate knowledge of you to tear you down and hit you in your weakest spots, only to build you back up to start again. How can you love somebody like that?

Abuse doesn’t have a one-worded answer, you’ve come to find out. There are adjectives and nouns and all types of classifiers you could use, but you don’t. Some people like to say they have “love-hate” relationships with things, often jokingly. You think that’s the only term that can describe your feelings towards your mom. Often you miss her—you’re reasonably sure it’s only natural for people to miss their parents sometimes. However, it’s impossible to reminisce on the good times without that familiar pang of hurt in your chest, your lower throat. The good times are inseparable from the bad times.

You think about the days it was hard to even get out of bed during high school. She would let you stay home as long as you had good grades, and the two of you would lay in her big queen-sized bed and watch movies all day and talk about random things. Then there are times like her getting within two inches of your face, pinning you to the bathroom wall while she screams at you and holds scissors to your face. It’s not fair that you still love her. How much easier your life would be if she were just entirely a horrible person. If she were utterly irredeemable. It makes you wonder if you’re weak—do you just have no moral spine? Are you just not willing to stand up for what’s right? You wouldn’t accept that sort of behavior from her if you weren’t related. You obviously know she’s in the wrong.

Is it a good heart, or just weakness? Your throat burns as if it's raw while you tighten your lips together. The rims of your eyeballs moisten only slightly, as if tears are attempting to well up, but no matter how much the emotion burns, nothing comes out.

Your phone buzzes, startling you and speeding your heart rate up by a few beats. It’s not a text message from your mom. No, the clock on your phone tells you that you have just another hour before she wakes up three hundred miles away. It’s a marketing email encouraging you to explore new financial options this month. You sigh, swiping the email out of your notifications bar. As the pixels leave the screen, you feel whatever emotion you’d been able to build up ebb away.

Finally, the pad of your thumb touches the screen, only to delete the message you had typed out.

You shut the screen off, reach over your partner, and set it on the bedside table.