Jennas 19th birthday

“Close the goddamn door for at least a minute Jenna, I’m sick of hearing that goddamn kids wailing” 

A young man sat at the edge of her bed, his menacing gaze intent on the crack of the bedroom door. He tugged at the belt loops of his pants while trying to keep the cigarette from slipping from his lips. He couldn’t of been older than thirty, but his hollowed out eyes, deep creases in his face and narrow veins protruding from his rough hands would make anyone wonder.

“You know that kids got nothin of me in him, or else he’d know better to respect his goddamn father” 

The slurred words slid out of his mouth, barely intelligible if one wasn’t under the same influence of the needle. 

“He only a month old, he doesn’t know better Charlie” Jenna replied.

“Whatever, he’s still a little bastard, how much do I owe you this time?” He replied. 

“Just sixty”

Her eyes were glued to the floor, knees tightly pressed together, lips pursed. She embodied shame. 

“You’d be prettier if you didn’t look so desperate” He said, casually tossing a few wrinkled bills onto the disheveled sheets. After slipping on his untied shoes he snatched his keys from the nightstand and made his way to the door, fumbling his way through the entryway while attempting to tuck in his wrinkled white shirt. 

She sat their idly, still, eagerly anticipating the moment the door would settle back into its rightful place. The cries of her young son still rang in the background. Even after his departure she stood their silent, unwavering, slowly building the courage to face her recently born son. She leaned her slumped shoulder into the door of the small bedroom, dragging her feet across the floor to the crib a few feet away. Her hands shook as she reached for her son. It had been at least two hours since she touched him, looked him in the eyes. She hated how much he looked like his father.

The boy cried harder as she yanked him close to her chest. His small paws reached away to anything that wasn’t her. His diaper was soiled, and a rash had begun to develop on his lower back. His already scarred throat eventually quelled his voice, the pain too unbearable for him to continue seeking help. She felt the same way most days. After about fifteen minutes, he settled his chin into her breast, his body still twitching from the intermittent sobs. 

Eventually he started drifting in and out of consciousness again, and she placed him back into the crib gently as possible, feeling as though she was diffusing a bomb. A few tears escaped her eyes despite how firmly she had been contorting her face in fear of some judgmental stranger witnessing her through the cracked open drapes which would never quite pull all the way closed.

She dipped her pinky into the yellow powder sitting in the tin foil on the nightstand, and delicately ran her finger along the inside of her sons bottom lip. He grimaced and whined a bit as usual. After a few more minutes his head stopped cocking from left to right, and he fell into a deep sleep, granting her at least an hour of reprieve. 

“Ignorance is bliss in the eyes of an addict...” Her fathers words rang through her skull and pierced the static which usually held her ears hostage. She had trouble deciphering whether it was another hypnagogic hallucination due to sleep deprivation or a side effect of withdraw. It was always her fathers voice which came to her when she was at her lowest, usually accompanied by the memory of her mother laying cold on the carpet, pale, silent, and trembling. It was never her intention to fit into either of their shoes, to be like them. The further she drifted from her father, the closer she came to her mother, which she simultaneously loathed and desired. She mirrored her mother in order to escape from her father, but she was scared of suffering her mother’s death as much as living her fathers life. It was a catch twenty two, and she couldn’t fathom becoming either one of them. Self loathing became an innate aspect, and often enslaved her to the expectations of her past rather than promoting hope for her sons future.

A slight whimper came from the next room. Her son had awoken much sooner than she expected, triggering a fierce, but short lived rage. She swung her heavy torso up from the couch, snapped her head back and let the weight of her body garner enough momentum to pull her to the bedroom once more. This time she was too weak to not to be careful. She gently scooped up her son, and they floated to the fridge together in pursuit of the last bottle of formula, which was of course a day expired. She knocked over the bottle on her first attempt. After her young son latched onto the nipple of the bottle, her eyes locked themselves onto the nearest inside corner of the motel room floor. Her focus wavered in and out, and vision blurred off and on. One last whimper let her know the bottle was empty, and drug her back to clarity. 

She couldn’t remember walking back to the crib. The blackouts were becoming more prevalent, but she still had enough wits about her to know how detrimental that could be for her and her sons survival. Inevitably the young mother felt trapped between her past and the future, feeling as though she was held hostage by her newborn son and all his needs even though she never had time to tend to her own. Time skipped by that afternoon, and she found her legs crippling beneath her as she sunk back into tangled sheets of her mattress. She drifted to sleep, again. 

Her dreams of demons ceased, replaced with semblances of familiar tragedies, agonies and haunting pieties. Stories of love and distrust, violence and disaster, unjust acts and accountability, all playing through her head with her as the main actor each night. The monsters were replaced with monstrous regrets that would prove caustic to flesh and mind. It used to be that the terror manifested before she would fall asleep, and that peace would always be waiting there upon wakening, but not anymore, not since the day she was burdened with a son, and her son was burdened with her.