The Light in the Window

There was something about the sunlight flooding through the windows that morning that reminded her of the day she found her mother hanging in the closet. The same brilliant white light had lit up her mother’s pale blue face that day, grotesque and foreign from her recent parting, and yet still so incredibly beautiful in that haunting sunlight.

 It flooded into the room from the window seat where she used to rock her baby in her arms and then, 13 years later, illuminated the scene of the fateful day that would haunt her only daughter for the rest of her life. She remembered how her Mama's favorite scarf, lavender with soft streaks of gold running through it, was wrapped around her slender, broken throat, and sparkled in the death hazed light. All she knew was that her Mama, once there, was now gone. And she was alone.

She can't remember now how long she stayed sitting on that cold wooden floor, staring at the white light pouring from the windows after they took her mother's cold, lifeless body from the room. It might have been minutes, or hours, or possibly days on end. The truth is, after that morning, she never stopped staring into that light. Maybe she was hoping it would blind her to the memory of what had happened, and maybe she was praying equally, that it would blind her for what was to yet to come. Even in that intense warm light, her bones were cold as night. Deep inside she knew she was alone now forever, and that her Mama had left her with him.

So many years have passed, and she has tried on so many different versions of herself, that she's no longer sure she can remember who she was, or even who she wanted to be, before that day. Before the woman who was supposed to show her how to live life, showed her instead, exactly what it looks like to give up on it. She wonders how someone like her mother, who had so much magic in her veins and fire in those emerald eyes, could have let herself be so deeply beaten down by a man. But worse than that, how she could have left her little girl alone with him - with that monster always lurking in the dark?

It was the ultimate betrayal.

So, she has spent her nascent life staring into the light whenever she can, avoiding feelings of being, because of him and because of her. So much time spent memorizing different shades of white and disappearing inside her mind into spaces on the walls and ceilings tiles, emotional hiding places where she clings desperately to the hope that if she can get far away enough in her mind, that maybe she will be saved for a moment to just feel nothing.

She has become an expert at jumping outside of herself; detaching magically from the evil of a body that can feel things that cannot be allowed to be felt- not if she wants to keep herself intact. So ever since that morning, she has been hiding in the light. The light that took the place of her mother; the one who was supposed to keep her safe and warm. But she never could get rid of the deep bone cold. The snap of a neck. The lavender scarf. The abandoned one, sitting on the cold floor wishing once more for a dead warm embrace.

Grown now, she knows better now than to ever think she is safe and when she leaves her door she passes strangers on the street like they are all suspicious ghosts, just as white and diaphanous as her thoughts, and certainly just as haunting. She learned you must go into the white light to avoid the pain of being alive. You must stay out of the dark world of feeling. So, she avoids the shadows by becoming one. She doesn't have friends or lovers, because you would have to share yourself with them and she has nothing to give and no one she will trust. She traded her hurt and innocence for emptiness a long time ago.

This is the ghost she has become. The shell hiding in an empty home, staring out the window and simply trying to forget.Days just keep passing and she rides time like a slowly burning train and wonders why she does not just do away with the darkness forever and slide out of life into the light like her mother did. What is the point of living just to be someone's used broken vessel?

And perhaps, that is the answer. That the natural result of his empty love, was the gaping hole in both of us where there was supposed to be a self. That is why the light shines through. This must be what happened to you, Mother. Why else, would you tie yourself up and drop from the ceiling of your life. Why else would you abandon me, your little girl to the wolves, unless you could not fight them off yourself?

She wraps the lavender scarf around her wrists like a chain as she swims laps in unanswered questions, but she is all too aware there is no point in trying to make sense out of life. Nature is cruel and none of us are guaranteed happiness or survival. She knows that no one is looking out for her and lives in a series of days that do not add up to much, and in a series of thoughts that she keeps to herself. She learned long ago that no one cares about the broken heart of a little girl, or of the mind of a woman who never got the chance to be anything more than a stunted self. She realizes her mother did not just kill herself that day; she broke any chance that her daughter would ever have at a normal life, along with her neck.

As she looks out the window now at the light streaming in, she knows that from that bright white winter morning on, she was never free to be anything other than a hanging dead woman's broken daughter.