My Mother, The Monster

Her life was a snowstorm; while the rest of us relied on oxygen to breathe she could not cope without inhaling a constant supply of that damnable white powder. It slid down her nasal passages, snaked its way through her veins and made a home of her habit- gradually evicting her health, her children and, eventually, her sanity.

When my mother told me to pack my bags, I knew it was only because she had done one too many bags. With vehemence in dilated eyes she fallaciously lamented how it was my very existence that had deprived her of her role as a mother in our lives.

I long for her to take an honest look in the mirror, but these days the closest she gets to that is when her reflection stares back at her widened nostrils, the straw cut as short as the one she dealt us.

Her life has become an illusion, and I have watched her disappear.

 

Ask Me Why I’m An Alcoholic

I have cleansed the taste if you from my tongue. Not with the saliva of another, no -I have washed it with the staunch taste of liquor; as strong as our passion, as bitter as our parting.

It isn’t long before I am seeing double, the way I did after each occasion that your fists acquainted themselves with my skull. Even more swiftly and I black out, not unlike the times your fingers became tendrils seeking my throat as the basis of their support, or the way my eyelid took on an inky hue every time someone that wasn’t you called me “pretty”, and you called me “whore”.

Nowadays, I am more familiar with the names of Jack Daniels, Johnny Walker and Jose freakin’ Cuervo than I will ever be with the multitude of men who attempt to press themselves against me at night, seeing my vacant eyes as an invitation between my thighs.

I am no whore, for were I to have invited multiple men inside of me simultaneously as you so desperately desired, or allowed you to witness numerous men abusing my body until I was as empty as the bottles I now frequently guzzle you may never have let me go when my head prevailed over the idiocy of my heart. The revolt ripples through me and I try sterilise the sin with a tot of tequila – or, you know, a bottle of gin.

But when I awake on a park bench in the early hours with bare recollections of the evening before, yet the anguish you inflicted still screams prominently in the front of my mind akin to the headaches that have made themselves a home in my cranium -with my tongue as their welcome mat- it’s as clear as the liquid I love that I can never escape the horror that your existence embodies. I can never flee the pain you inflicted, and the harsh reality grounds me with as much force as your fists ever did.

And in that moment of clarity I know I can acknowledge the hurt and be hindered, or accept the pain and proceed.

I feel this deserves a toast.

But instead, I put the bottle down… and pick myself up.