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Some time ago I taped up a photograph of my brother on my bedroom wall. The photograph was one of the many copies he’d made for a class project and left all over the floor. I carefully added it to the drawings and print-outs of poems I’d added to my wall over the previous weeks. My mother had mentioned this collage only once, and that was to voice her disapproval. “Tengo ya demasiado para que conviertas tu habitación en un museo“, she’d said. “I have enough already, for you to go and turn your room into a museum.” But on this occasion the photograph of my brother, smiling in a garden rendered unidentifiable by our elderly printer’s manic bursts and stutters, made her pause.

“You really love him, don’t you?”

I looked at her, perplexed. Love was not the reason I’d taped up the photograph. The two things, “love” and “photograph” felt unconnected to me. My mother’s comment, however, brought into my world a sudden and very tenuous link between them, twins separated at birth meeting for coffee. It made me look at the photographs of me, placed around the house in silver frames, in a new light. Flipping the laminated pages of albums became like a trip through a dream. If it unnerved me before, to see past versions of myself in lace dresses, absorbed in paintings, reclining on grassy fields – now I’m horrified by it.

Sometimes my mother holds a photograph of me close to her face, something I’d always interpreted to be more out of poor eyesight than affection. She traces the line of my cheek and says little words of endearment: cariño, amor, sol. Mi sol. My sun. The sun, eight minutes away at light speed, but still nearly 164 years away at 65 miles an hour, which is as fast as my mother is willing to drive. “How can you dismantle the sun?”

There I am, sitting on the night table, eight years old and playing the princess in “Emperor’s New Clothes”. There I am again, on top of the shoe closet, leaning against a wall in my elementary school uniform. And again, next to my mother’s red jewelry box. And again, glued to the computer monitor at her workplace. I need to be rid of these photographs. Sometimes my despair is so great I seriously consider taking the kitchen scissors to them, chopping my body into ribbons of glossy paper. “Love” and “photograph”, this makes as little sense to me as the dismantling of the sun did to my classmate. The sun and its termination shock, the point where solar winds slow down and stop, a point whose location is a mystery even to the most dedicated of scientists. God, all those photographs, framed and hung like letters salvaged from an ancient Countess’s boudoir. I want to grab my mother by the shoulders and scream: This is not how you love someone!

(title taken from “The Chain” by Fleetwood Mac. It’s also what I was listening to throughout the writing of this sordid, miserable tale)

At the time I would’ve have perhaps have said something as dramatic as “my childhood died”. But please don’t think too badly of me for it. It sure felt like death, then.

My greatest fear is that my feelings are not genuine. I doubt the sincerity of my thoughts and actions at every hour of the day. When I think, are these thoughts true or just what I wish I would think? When I move, are these movements real or do they just take me where I wish I had the guts to go? When I feel, are these feelings born in pulpy mass of my heart, or deep in my prefrontal cortex? I can’t put any sort of faith into the steps I take, nor the sounds of my throat. I don’t part with even small bits of myself wholeheartedly. “Wholeheartedly”? Emotions don’t possess me, and I miss this secret fervor, this fervor that I witness from far away with a wan smile: girls hugging in photographs, a boy crying at the movie theater, a woman begging a medium to let her speak to a deceased child. “Wholeheartedly”? Every single time I’ve said I was moved by something I have lied.

There have been a few moments in my life in which I have known with certainty: ah. Ahh. This is real. These moments occupy a definite place in me, and I could not bear to lose them. Even if I were stricken with amnesia after a freak automobile accident, like the beautiful heroine of a primetime soap, I couldn’t possibly forget: watching a videotape of my baby brother playing with the balloons floating over an air vent, and then looking up to see that same brother, eight years older, brushing away the tears from his eyes.

When classmates ask me what I want to be when I grow up, the answer is different each time. “A biologist in Antarctica”, “a Tibetan monk”, “a missing person” all half-truths! It’s hard to feel something real, or feel for something real.

I have a theory: a person’s childhood ends when they come to understand their parents. I think I gained that knowledge on April 11th. It was knowledge that made me weep like a madwoman for hours. I have a theory: part of a person dies when they spend an entire night crying without anyone noticing.

I’m not going to lie. A lot of this has come about due to my mother’s bipolar disorder. I’ll never forget the summer of ’09. My mother’s illness brought upon me an awakening of sorts. It was in 2009 that I first became terrified that my feelings are not real. But I’m ready now, to accept what has happened, and I’m ready to do what I can to help not only myself feel, but those who surround me. In a way, I’m grateful I have gone through this. I never would have put so much stock into the importance of feeling, otherwise. I never would have decided what my aim in life is, either. It’s not “a biologist in Antarctica” or “a Tibetan monk” anymore. It’s definitely not “a missing person”. I think I have been “a missing person” for many years now, and I’m ready to give that up.

Now, when classmates ask what I want to be when I grow up, the real answer is always “a good person”. I have spent my entire childhood being the Cowardly Lion, letting others step up and put their own brave (impossibly brave!) hearts on the line. I don’t just want my feelings to be real, I want to be proud of them.

My childhood ended because I finally understood my parents. My father became a man, and my mother a woman, both of them flawed, both of them humans who have spent many years of their lives teaching me. Today, I feel like a historian that looks at a set of hieroglyphs for the hundredth time and finally understands what they mean.

I am not a child anymore. As an adult, I won’t ask for anything I can’t give myself. So while I am still here, crossing over, let me make one last plea to the universe: if I have lost something now, please let me gain something else. If my childhood is over, if time has switched eras and changed this place, this way I live, allow me to win for myself something different, something new, something that will make me think ah, this is real! If all goes well, maybe something that will help propel me to my goal, my hope of being “a good person”. It doesn’t have to be now, just sometime, someday, if you’d be willing to oblige me. For once, I can say, genuinely, sincerely, wholeheartedly: this is something I would really love.

AVISAR A: Next of kin, a living blood relative, lady or gent in seashell sleeves and moccasins, sharing pulpy warmth and the orange glow of intimate space. Warn, inform, a somebody who’ll sit in the spring green waiting room with collar unbuttoned and shoulders like crumbled cliffs. AVISAR A: Somehow who, without you, hovers nervously, cut off from the rest of the meandering river, an oxbow lake in a secluded glade, swollen and stagnant.

It is Christmas Eve, and it has been six hours since my mother left, four since her last call. Her “hello?” had plucked at me, plunging into the ridges of my bodily tissues and fluids.

“I’m at the sea.” she’d said. I’d recalled our summer house, the Isabelline white hut with rooms like smoking dens, shrouded by the crystalline ocean. Did she stand beside the waves and think them beautiful? Oh, but, the water is very cold this time of year! I am the aging owner of a shore side souvenir shop, crouched underneath the windowpane as my mother, hair aflame, hurls stones at my glossy postcards and carefully glued together baubles.

Phone conversations with my mother tend to end with my delivery of a monologue, freshly cooked on a gas stove, my fingertips dripping faucet water onto sauce pans, enticing the maternal blue flame. “Please come home when you’re ready”, I’d said, keeping it as brief as possible, “You are not alone!” But despite my precautions, the speech was long and wordy enough to give her time and reason enough to cry. Her “okay” hung in the vacuum of the telephone line, in between twin sobs, hurricanes in which her sentiments solidify like eyes.

If one day I am hit by a force greater than one I am able to assimilate, if an act of God leaves me split open by a country road, perhaps some insightful paramedic storing my belongings in plastic bags will encounter my mobile phone. If he does, and if he thinks to go through my address book and begin dialing numbers, this is the first thing he’ll find:

AVISAR A, followed by a discrete colon, and then -

MOTHER

Once someone told me I am at my most pretty when I am crying. I think that’s true of a great many girls, maybe boys, though I have only ever seen a few of those cry. Most people would say the beauty of crying is its vulnerability, but I don’t think I agree. When I cry, I go to the bathroom and stare hard at my face. Then I wipe my runny nose with toilet paper, sit on the floor and think to the future, to the days I will not be crying.

My face when I cry is flushed, but that itself is not discernibly sad. The color is warm, red blood vessels contracting underneath dark skin, pleasing even to a critical eye. My mouth, which has always been small and and my most trustworthy feature, does not falter. It can somehow, miraculously, still the picture of my collapsing brow, but never the eyes underneath.

Something about the whole damn thing is aesthetic. Not necessarily pretty, like that someone once said, but definitely aesthetic. I have yet to decide if it’s a car-crash aesthetic or a zen-garden aesthetic.

When my mother cries, nothing about the scenario or her face is attractive. I want to clasp her arm, I want to punch her as hard as I can. When she cries, I become someone I don’t know, someone who can comfort and cry at the same time, a someone who can hold her mother while praying for the days she’ll never have to cry again.

At two o’clock in the morning my mother turns on all the lights in the house. She wipes off her shoes and shucks off her lipstick. My mother breathes like the bogeyman, leaving shell-shaped marks of perspiration on the walls. She opens a drawer to tuck in the silk grey scarf and the matching elbow-length gloves that I sometimes steal from her. I spread the stitching open and sleep in her clothes, familiarize myself with the missing perfume I coveted as a babe, the velvet-lined pockets she keeps her peppermint candies. I imprint her milk sea smell onto my skin, and it feels as warm and as intimate as a scream, a womb.

My father pokes a searching hand, and then a head and a belly, from out of the covers. My parents had bought the covers in a furniture store off Dolores Marquez for cheap. I had found them tucked into their mattress upon coming home one weekday: cotton in ugly purple and yellow geometric shapes, vaguely reminiscent of a lava lamp. I couldn’t believe a household purchase had been made that I hadn’t been informed about, let alone one that screamed bachelor pad. My father had insisted that they had been my mother’s choice and my mother, from her perch in the living room, had yelled “Liar!”

My mother sits on the side of the bed and wraps a Chinese-print robe around herself. Her eye lids are baby raw and baby thin, the heliotrope of a halved plum. She starts talking about the restaurant she and the bus stop mothers had gone to. My father makes a sharp squawking sound, opening one eye, sclera glinting in the dark. He is woken up by the careening external factor of my mother’s white arms, my mother’s thick, black voice. When I was young, the rule of the house was that if I wanted a glass of water, if I had had a nightmare, if I had burst awake in the night with the conviction I was going to die then I’d wake my father up and not my mother. The knowledge came as I slithered out of a birth canal, with the perfume of my mother’s dizzy body.

She doesn’t have a problem waking up my father.  He rubs his neck with his fingertips as she gets to the part about the drag queen from Ribaroja named Cruella Bin Laden. My father, the man in the corduroys and the neat crushed strawberry shirts and the glasses, does not know what a drag queen is. The next morning, as we’re brewing the exotic chocolate tea my mother had bought on a whim in a bazaar (it’s dank and unpalatable; we later have to drain it down the sink), he’ll ask me. When I tell him, he smiles. If it had been me or my brother at a drag queen venue he would would raised his sparse cat-like eyebrows and been uncomfortably, privately horrified. But it is my mother, so we know to look at each other with the understanding of compatriots. He opens the dry, brown mouth that built the sky my mother birthed for me. He lets his inside voice bloom into laughter I coveted as a babe along with my mother’s smell, sound I followed through halls like thermoluminescence. We watch my swimming, growing, baby mother, frictionless, careless creature be.

(image source)

It’s been three months since the first manic phase. I’ve become so used to the swings they hardly surprise me now: the sudden switch from a normal tone of voice to screaming, the sobs breaking and cracking the air, like ambulance sirens. Actually, I have been doing this my entire life. In a way, I wasn’t at all shocked when I realized what was happening. I’ve always known she wasn’t exactly okay. She likes to say she knows me because I was in her stomach, it’s one of her most beloved phrases when we’re fighting. Emma, you can’t lie to me, you were in my belly once! But then the knowledge of each other is mutual, isn’t it? I know it’s true. I know it’s true.

I used to be furious when my classmates rolled their eyes and said I’m angry at the world in conversation for no reason at all; I wanted to pick them up and tell them they had no idea what it was to be angry to the world. I know enough now to realize that it was wrong of me to think that way. I am not the only one with her own monsters. Shit happens, it just does. It’s a good thing I’ve been coaching her through emotional breakdowns for years now, dragging her back and forth through what I’d thought to be brief depressive phases. It’s a good thing I understand. It’s a good thing I have already forgiven her.

When I was going through the worst of it also happened to be the moment I got the best piece of advice I’ve gotten thus far. Emma? she had called in, beckoning me from the doorway. Her office had been cluttered. She had been signing checks. Your father told me what happened. You know, my mother was like that too. And it was really hard. Because she’s your mom. But you have to know, Emma, what the most important thing is. It’s okay to be selfish. Be selfish. Care about yourself. Care about her, too, but you do what you have to do. Okay? Okay.

I had thanked her, and then I had gone to my room. I had laid down on the bed, arms stretching to the corners, and I had looked up at the ceiling fan and taught myself to survive.

I feel a little okay now, mostly because I have a job to do. It’s not going to be fine, but I am helping us towards the right direction. Despite what I’ve been living in, I feel like a superhero.