Dear Mother

I was writing again when my mother entered. She hates that I write, even though it helps me express myself better. Maybe that's why she hates it. Today she hit me again. Says I only serve to annoy her. I don't know why my hobby matters so much to her. At least, as I write, I don't cry, because of the pain I feel with every breath I take. I have marks all over my body from hitting me so much and bruises left by the many hours I spend lying on the concrete, especially on my elbows, hands and ribs. My fingers don't even have skin anymore, from how much they scrape on the floor as I write on it with my own blood. It's the only thing I have.

"Go back to bed!"- She yelled.

I spend the day in bed, if that's what you call a mattress lying on the floor, dirty, dusty and grimy. I tried to rebel and even said that I wouldn't sleep in that pestilent thing anymore. I didn't have the strength to get up from the ground, where I was writing. Impatient, she hit me again, this time, until I lost consciousness. When I woke up, I was very sore and cold. The mattress was no longer there.

"Great...now I'll have to sleep on the floor...again."

I hate this. I don't even have a rug or blanket to cover me. In the bedroom there is only a flashlight and...well, nothing else, since the bed is gone. It really looked like a prison, except for the window.

Prisons have windows.

I have no sense of time, but I think I've lived like this since I was eleven, when my father died. Sometimes she is happy to see me bleed or in pain. Every year on my birthday, she comes into the room and cuts deep into my skin. I have 17 scars, counting. Like the days in a jail are counted. After that, she burns my body with an iron or rips out pieces of flesh. She only stopped doing so when there was no more meat on my bones.

The day I killed my father, she said that I would pay for what I did and that she would make my life a living hell because I didn't deserve to live and death was too good for me. Despite everything, I think she loves me, because when I smile (almost toothless and the skin on my skeletal face crinkles) she smiles with me.

Maybe she doesn't want me to write because one day, later on, someone will read it and think she was a bad mother. Or maybe she doesn't want to read the terrible deaths I have planned for her, if I ever manage to get out of this state. To me, she's just a victim, who's lived longer than I'd like. If I recover, everything she did to me will seem like a dream. I don't think of myself as cruel, actually. After all, when a disgusting man tries to abuse his daughter, the only thing left to do is defend ourselves. That's the version I told her, tearful, full of cuts and bruises I made on myself, to blame my father for. She obviously didn't believe. The truth is, I don't know why I did it. For attention? Annoyance? Maybe because the voices I hear insisted. No... It wouldn't be fair to blame them. I did it on my own initiative and mine alone. Out of spite, as my mother likes to point out. I still remember her crying as she saw me sitting over his lifeless body, blood everywhere and my hands buried in his guts. If I close my eyes, I still feel the softness of the organs. Those are the only things I still want to live for.

I've already tried not to take the drugs she gives me, but she administrates them intravenously and I can't hold her hand tight enough to stop her and have a fair fight. If I could make her believe I was asleep, maybe she wouldn't intervene. Avoid going in, I hope. She wouldn't even do it to feed me. I haven't eaten decently since I bit off her nipple while breastfeeding. That's when she realized I wasn't normal. My grades at school, lack of friends and the way I looked at people (as possible victims) only proved that. But she never did anything about it, because I never gave her reasons...until my father's incident.

I managed to get her to believe in my deep sleep for two days, but the medication doses remained the same. They only subsided on the third day, when she started checking my pulse and breathing, thinking she had taken my life. It was possible to hear her sigh of joy, anguish and sadness. She was worn out but didn't want me dead. Yet.

After what I suppose was a week, the dose had decreased considerably, what agonized me the most was feeling the feeding tube go down to the stomach, as if it were a duck that you make filet mignon with. I could hear her laugh as she put the tube down my throat. She liked the feel of it under her finger, running up and down my trachea. She looked at it so closely that I felt her breath on my skin.

Finally, I had regained enough strength to get up without falling. I took the test of standing up completely for what I thought was six days. I counted them by the times she fed me, once a day. At this point, I no longer felt dizzy or wanted to vomit. I waited patiently, lying down, for the time to come when she would return. I don't know how much time passed, if it was minutes or hours. I continued to save strength and build up anger.

I had to hold back my smile when I finally heard the heavy door open and the dim flashlight illuminating the room. I felt it as she knelt beside me and set the tube on the floor, as well as the glass container that held that disgusting liquid she was giving me. In all that time, I learned her moves. I took advantage of it as she put the lid of the container on the floor and grab the tube as fast as I can, shoving it through her eyeball. I rejoiced to hear her scream in pain and agony, her body rolling on the floor. Blood spurted through the room. She held her face, trying to stop the pain, but it was no use. I sat on her stomach and partially removed the tube from her eye socket, re-threading it back in, over and over again as she did with my throat. I only stop when the eye has dissolved into a gelatinous liquid.

"Now it's my turn to play, dear mother."

And with those words, the crying increased. She realized that she would spend the rest of her days wishing to die and regretting that she hadn't allowed death to take me while it could.