What Could Have Been

The last time I stayed up long enough to see the sunrise was before I killed Mother. 

She would bounce into my bed and tickle my chest and neck in the dark hours of the morning. It was very effective in waking up a child from the midst of her sugar-filled dreams. Father says I get grouchy when I don’t wake of my own accord, but that never happened with Mother. I was happy to see her beautiful face and hear her hushed giggles regardless of when or how or whatever discomfort I was feeling. 

“Come with me, my darling,” she would say. “I have a surprise for you.”

I followed her like a blind duckling out the bedroom window and through the grass. It was a game of how far I could run after her without calling for her to pause. Every time she said she had a surprise, I would know exactly where we were going. We scurried past the chicken coop and climbed onto the isolated deck. 

Mother stored all her supplies under the floorboards there. In the blackness of the night, she would set up her easel, and I would watch, transfixed at how effortless she made it all seem. She moved like a fairy, holding her magic wand to the canvas and dipping it into the spells she squeezed from her bottles with nothing but starlight to guide her. It was hard to see my own hand in front of me, but Mother didn’t need anything as insignificant as vision. 

“What you see with your eyes isn’t always what is, my darling,” she told me. “When you learn to see with your heart, that’s when the real magic happens and you see what is beyond.”

I never understood what she meant until after her death.

I was going through her things again, and found the set of paintings she would only ever make in the dead of night. The colors were always a little bit off, and understandably so, except for one specific piece.

Mother’s best work.

Neither of us wanted to go back inside that day. I sat quietly by her side, and she told me stories of princes and dragons and everything we will never know outside of the pictures in our minds. 

“All the plants and animals around us want to be born as humans in their next life. They look at us and think, ‘Wow I would like to be sitting there at that easel’ or ‘I wish I had such delicious food and such a warm home.’ Finally, after many trials and many failures, a soul is able to reincarnate as a person. This is your story and your gift. Don’t waste this priceless opportunity, and live however you wish and do whatever makes you happy,” she once said.

But she never really believed in that story. She mustn’t have, or she would still be alive.

That day, we sat there next to each other until small wisps of orange and pink spilled out over the trees. Mother gasped softly and shook my leg. 

“The night is beautiful, my darling, but it only makes you appreciate the candy-like sunrise even more. And the same is true for the opposite. The mix of colors in the sky and life waking up all around us teaches us to appreciate the expanse of black and peaceful silence of the night.”

I had never looked at that painting before, even when Mother was making it. I was too busy gazing at her. In the light, she didn’t look like a fairy anymore. 

She was a child of the early morning sky. Golden yellow rays illuminated her cheeks when she sat by her easel. Her skin shimmered like powdered pearls, and I thought she looked so, so beautiful. I wanted to look just like her when I was grown.

A piece of curly dark blonde hair escaped from her bun, and the frazzled bits seemed to glimmer. Her entire being seemed to phase into the air, or perhaps she was an extension of the dawn. 

She put her brush down and closed her eyes as she inhaled the pastel colors around us, painting her lungs the same as her canvas. It was a picture forever etched in her soul. A reminder of the unfiltered euphoria from the smallest things the world has to offer in a place only she can see. 

I copied her to make my own souvenir, but I carved an iridescent glass statue of Mother in my heart instead. The sunrise isn’t what made the moment so beautiful after all.

I was already in my day clothes by the time Father came to collect me. Mother’s painting was tucked behind the laundry since he never goes where “women and servants belong.” Her hair was still in a bun, and there was a small yellow stain on her left ring finger, which she kept behind my back. I was ushered out of the room, and I could see him grabbing her arm and forcing her fist from behind her own back through the crack in the door. Lillian came to fetch me as she always does before starting her chores. She cleans the windows as I study arithmetic and history, the way Father says it should be. 

Words drifted on the morning breeze in Father’s voice, like “only concern yourself with the boy and the household” and “will not tolerate this waste of money for unladylike behavior anymore.” 

Father didn’t show up to dinner even though it was well past noon. Mother said it was because he was busy, but the guilty expression on her face proved otherwise. I knew it had something to do with this morning, but I also knew better than to ask. Mother’s brain is made of eyes, however, and she knew what I knew.

“You know, my ocean, the people who shame you for being who you are are screaming from behind their own chains. This includes your father. And me too.”

Only Mother calls me “my ocean”. And “darling.” Father calls me “the boy” or “Armin” if there’s company. I like hearing the name “Armin” from Mother’s mouth, however, even if it isn’t mine. 

“Why does Father disapprove of your paintings?”

A shadow of exhaustion from a lifetime of war darted across her face. 

“He doesn’t see the world the same way we do, darling. I capture our world on that canvas, and he doesn’t understand it from inside his box. But his approval means nothing. I control what I make, not what others interpret.”

I get dressed for the day and head out to town for breakfast and a cup of tea. There are no lessons today. Father needs to keep up appearances of grievance, so as not to add more fuel to the overspreading wildfire of gossip. I sit in a lone booth in the darkest corner of the teahouse for the security of its isolation. I clutch Mother’s brooch and turn it over in my hands without the slightest bit of pressure lest I break it like I broke her. 

Her brooch is not delicate in the least. It survived everything Mother didn’t, after all. Even her death. They retrieved it from her blouse when they found her body and Father had no use for it, so it was passed down to me. Table scraps absentmindedly tossed to a dog. One of the petals, a hushed baby pink color, was chipped but the brooch was otherwise intact. The diamond center of the flower and the rose-gold swirling stems were dulled with time and love, the luster and sparkle slowly fading over its lifetime like its owner. 

Mother was wearing this brooch when she painted that sunrise, when she ate with me when Father didn’t show up, and when she handed me her art supplies to dispose of discreetly. 

I never did. Even to a murderer like myself that seemed heartless. I tucked it away somewhere and forgot all about its existence. 

Mother never came into my room for an early morning adventure under the constellations after that day. I dared question her about it once, and she turned her head and buried her thoughts and words in her breakfast. The light in her eyes dimmed slightly with each passing day, but I was seeing her through gold-tinted crystal lenses and didn’t notice. There used to be a pump in her heart that would release little sugar-plums and Ulysses butterflies that resembled the bejeweled sea with each push. As her eyes darkened, so did her heart, and the pain started to clog that pump until all the plums and butterflies were trapped and couldn’t escape. It was unfair, but life picks and chooses whom it favors, whom it neglects, and whom it spites. 

A new crack appeared in my marble mind every time her pump buffered, but a man who lives in a desert can’t feel the heat after a while. Mother’s unhappiness became routine, and her blossoming cruelty became commonplace. 

The hushed voices of the teahouse drag me by the throat to the present.

“Is that the child?”

“How could that happen?”

“The poor husband.”

Their words are like mer-creatures above land. Insufferable screeching with no end. 

Eyes cut into me from all corners of the room. They emerge from the ground and furniture in tumors until they’re all I can see. They squeeze around my legs and my arms as cancerous tentacles and drag me into their quicksand portal to shame. 

Before they can swallow me whole, I leave my coat, fee, and half-finished tea in that booth and flee from the impending misery.

I take refuge in a park nearby. The velvet treetops are a barrier from the needle-toothed foxes in pretty gowns and expensive watches. 

“You must never show weakness. The world is like a moat and people are like hungry crocodiles desperately awaiting their next meal. If you lose your footing on the rocks, you’ll fall into the moat and be devoured. You must always be perfect,” Mother said once. 

Peals of soft laughter like belled anklets waft through the butterweeds. I heard something like this once when Father had me visit the boarding schools before Mother’s death. I had gotten lost on my way to the library and ended up on the womens’ floor. Their giggles and gossip were a siren’s call beckoning me to join in their innocent mischief and harmless schemes. 

“You’re so talented. I wish I was unique like you,” they said to each other.

But they didn’t realize that being ordinary is a luxury taken for granted by those who don’t suffer the same. 

The eyes start coming out of the snowdrops as the laughter in the park fades to red. My sanctuary is no longer safe. I escape once more until I can finally breathe again. There are too many people on this street to notice the black mark on my conscience. 

I draw a deep breath in and stroll down the street, mixing into the crowd of ants until I am invisible and insignificant. My legs walk themselves and the body attached to them follows absentmindedly. 

Mother’s favorite boutique. That’s where I end up. 

A chiffon gown the color of the midday summer ocean is displayed in the window, the same color as my eyes. If I could only go inside and float into it like a Mountain Bluebird. Feel the fabric twist and jump with every movement I make. Perhaps in another life I won’t be Armin anymore. I will be Marina, like I call myself in the dark hours of the morning with nothing but the walls as my witness. Perhaps Mother might even have called me that on our surprise adventures as another of our secrets. But it is futile to think too much on what could have been. I look at the dress once more, and my body is ice. 

She is dead because of a gown just like this. 

I believed she was in town, so I felt innocuous in visiting her room. Nights alone with only my name for company made my heart ache, and I was foolish enough to try and claim a slice of the life I wished for. I pulled the cursed dress out of her closet and held it up to my body. Oh, the exultation I felt. The sound it made when I turned. The ripples, like rain on a silver lake, when I walked. I rejoiced in just how right it was, but triumph seldom differentiates itself from defeat. 

I was too distracted by my own jubilation to notice those dreaded footsteps. It was only when Mother’s head was in view that I threw the dress back into the closet and hid behind the door. Mother’s footsteps stopped for a few moments in the deafening silence throttling my lungs before she turned and went back from where she came. 

Her body was found the next morning. 

She had climbed the roof the same way I had seen her do with the grace and effortless strength of a kelpie. She had worn the brooch I loved so much and dove like a wingless swan, meeting her end on the ugly steps of our porch. 

“It’s not your fault,” they said. “Don’t blame yourself.” 

They thought blame was all that mattered and no one would burn if they didn’t feel guilt. 

“It’ll be alright,” they said. “You’ll be fine.”

But you can’t make a rainy day sunny by changing your perspective.

Perhaps she hadn’t seen me. Perhaps she didn’t care that I was there to begin with. 

But if I wasn’t reason enough to live, it’s the same as taking her life with my own hands. 

All I could think about when I saw her shell twisted and demented was how beautiful she used to be. Her and the paintings she loved so much. But if they were beautiful, then all the most beautiful things are born from the ugliest pits.

“How could this happen?” they asked. “How could she do this to herself, her family?”

People can shove you closer and closer to a cliff but still act surprised when you lose your footing and fall to your death.

She tried to touch the world with her bare hands, but she realized the world burns even when it’s not on fire. So she stopped touching anything. Because once you’ve been burned you can heal, but the skin will be tighter and more wrinkled, and you can only touch the world so many times before you can’t touch anything at all.

It is night now, and I am watching the white light from the moon purify the blackness of the lake. 

I can see Mother’s face in the image of the moon, a pure heart tainted by the blackness of the world. Everyone, including me, saw her in a way that can be described with a few words: beautiful, heartless, pitiful. But there are many sides to every story and many faces to every person. You never know enough.

I should know to focus on the happiest moments we shared, but regret is far stronger than gratitude. 

If there is one thing I do know, however, it is that I am not to blame for who I am. The gods may judge me, but I fear their sins are far greater and graver than my own. 

All that is left now is to take Mother’s advice and make the most of this precious gift we call life, even if she didn’t know how to do the same. 

After all, the fastest way to kill is through a sad heart.