zipped.

"Why are you making me think about this?"


Because you have been not thinking about it for twenty years. I can only attest to the twenty years i witnessed and waited for you to think about it. Unknowingly, I demanded with my very presence that you be better, and could you not be better my four year old voice would sing you to sleep. I sang off key staccato songs about a Jesus who had abandoned you, like your father, like your brother, like your husbands did and would again, like your sons and daughter would one day as well. From my small round mouth came false ballads of a God who could lead you from your bed and the self-imposed night of your smoke-filled room, into a morning of exuberant peace. To your lost, broken heart, I must have sounded like the most vicious of perjurers.

It may sound strange after all this time. You must be angry that it has taken me twenty years to ask you, and when I finally have, it isn't the question you had craved. I could pretend to not know what question you had dared to hope for. You wanted to account to me all of your horrors, or to deny me the privilege of sharing in them with you. Starkly you have tatooed the world's trepsasses against you on your arms, on your face, on your heart, lest you forget and they affront you again. You have painted them in blackest ink across your teeth, so that every word may be filtered through them, stained and flavored with them. Yet the inscriptions on your skin are enscrawled in a dead and language, wrapped up tight and mummified so that it may never rot, never fade. The paintings on your teeth kept behind tight lips, which would never betray you.

I don't want to read them. I don't want to know those terrible things. I see the markings and can see by their shapes, by the angry downstrokes of every letter that they do not bring good tidings. I seek a different knowledge. I challenge you to show me your happiness. Your joys, few or multiple as they may be. Once again I am demanding something of you mother.

Don't deny me, when you have denied me so much already.