BEFORE I DIE, I PRAY TO BE BORN | ✓

▬▬ 14

SUNDAY
23 SEPTEMBER, 1990
ISAIAH

               Holding my breath, I stare down the dim staircase. When I'm sure there's no movement in the living room, I touch the mezuzah on Muma's doorframe, kiss my fingers, and slip into her room dressed in only a towel.

Evening light filters through the Star of David suncatcher and elevates every speck of dust to gold. The handmade moringa perfume, too, turns amber in its glass bottle. Easing the cap off, I press each of my wrists over the mouth and flip it over twice, then daub them to either side of my neck, and finally brush each on my chest. This is my quiet ritual of rebellion. She despises me for this.

In my preteens, I used to sneak in here to try on her wigs, the ones she wore after getting married but before everyone found out about her affair with my dad. I was short enough then for the longest to brush my thighs. I always felt lovelier in her mirror than in my own.

Even now, as I watch my reflection stand amongst the perennial mess of her room, the crags of my jutting hipbones and harsh shoulders soften. Watching myself feels like looking at film photographs of strangers. Delicate colours and feathered lines bring forth nostalgia for a past I know has never happened, and yet, I'm convinced the memories are mine.

Standing amongst her fragments of home — a teal tapestry with Hebrew script I can't read above her bed, prongs of dead coral scattered between her perfume vials, embroidered kaftans and colourful dresses spilling from her broken wardrobe, a crystal ball urn lamp — I become someone in the dreamscape between myself and my mother: who I could have been. Who I should have been, maybe.

If not, what others should have done. My father should have stayed with Muma when their affair was discovered rather than let himself be scared or bought into fleeing. Her parents should have supported her rather than kicked her out for tarnishing their honour. I should have been born in the heart of Jamaica rather than England's shrivelled kidney.

I trace my sky blue durag as if it's sleek hair that reaches the knobs of my spine. Moringa envelopes me and I become someone else — correction: it's myself I become. In my mother's room, where I stand naked save for a towel and smile at my reflection as I hold her gold earrings beside my face is the purest me I've ever been.

Lately, I have to dilute myself even with you. Even with you because, though I know you'd never do it on purpose, you have the power to ruin me. If I have to be ruined I'd like it to be by you. But I don't want to shove guilt in your lap like a "think fast!" prank we played as kids. I don't want to make anything difficult for you.

I peel my gaze from the mirror, replace Muma's jewellery onto the glass tray beside her perfumes, and slip out as silently as I entered.

I cross the square metre landing to my own room. My doorframe doesn't have a mezuzah: Muma won't let me. I thought it was laziness but when I installed one myself, she tore it off. She says I don't need it, that God hates me as is and there's no point in trying. All the siddurim in the house are in Hebrew script which she never taught me to read.

Even sunlight refuses to mirage my room as anything more than a wardrobe, a bed, a stack of school books, and a spare chair I took from the kitchen because our table never has use for more than one.

But I have treasures Muma has yet to burn. Thirty postcards gleam above my bed from Dorian's summer in Egypt though all have the same photo of a Halsett Apple orchard. I bought them myself and slipped them into his bag so he couldn't worry himself into not writing. On the adjacent wall, a cluster of poems flutters when I shut the door behind me. All are handwritten, some my own and others copied from library books. The off-white paint between them is dotted with mismatched stickers that doctors gave me as a child.