paradoxical

genetics gave me brown eyes and years worth of feminine rage

"You are like a carbon copy of your father."
I hear for the thousandth time in my lifetime.
I see the faint smile on her face drop slightly, but it is plastered back on within milliseconds.
I still saw it though.
She does not know I did.

"I drank at senior week. I wanted to tell you."
I confess to her while we are on a walk.
I see her hesitate in her response,
as if she thinks that the birds,
the trees,
the blades of grass
will remember this initial reaction and immortalize it as I will.

She thanks me for telling the truth and proceeds to tell me of an adventure she had in her
youth with her best friend involving alcohol. My eyes never leave her face. Her smile. As she
rambles on, I try to remember a time when her smile was that radiant and blinding, when it
made the sun cower in fear and flee behind the nearest cloud.

I cannot.

I have never seen her so happy in one moment, I feel a twinge of guilt once I realize the
moment consists of her reminiscing on something--not experiencing it.

"I needed you! Pittsburgh is home. Not here."
I scream, tears spilling down my face as my voice cracks and nails dig into my forearm in a
measly attempt to draw blood.
She lets me go up to my room.
She waits ten minutes before following me.
I tell her to get out.

She doesn't.

She sits next to me.
I tell her everything she shouldn't have to but needs to hear. I tell her that somewhere along
the road, she raised a daughter with a plethora of problems, and that I beg her to make sure my
sister doesn't ever feel how I did. How I do.

I look over to see silent tears streaming down her face.
And I am overwhelmed,
crushed,
as I establish that I will cry a million tears over the worst things I go through, that I yearn to go
back in time and keep hurting silently, rather than be the cause of hers.

She grips my hand so tightly.
As if it is an anchor.
As if she will drown under the weight of her supposed failures—each syllable of my finally bare and disclosed suffering acting as tidal waves of every sign she missed,
every word she didn't say

every question she didn't ask

every time she chalked it up to teenage hormones.

But she did not fail.

I begin to swim against the tide now, my arms flailing desperately as I try to throw lifeboats into
the water,
as I tell her it is not her fault.
"It is not your fault!" I say, my voice bleeding with desperation whilst I choke up water.
She has already drowned though.

I am left with the excruciating reminder that it was her first-time swimming.
Just as it is mine.
Just because she has been doing it longer, more effortlessly, doesn't mean she is invincible.
She does not control the tide, nor the waves, despite experience.

It was her first-time swimming.
It's her first time in the water.
This is all her first attempt.
Just as it is mine.

It is in that moment that I squeeze her hand back twice as hard.
It is CPR.
She struggles onto the lifeboat.
I lean my head on her shoulder.
We cry together.

We cling to each other on the lifeboat, our bodies soaked with the reminder that she is me,
And I am her.

She is all I can be,
And I am all she could've been.

She leans her head atop mine.
It is a trivial action that serves as a declaration.
I know in that moment; she is my mother, and I am her daughter, and that will forever mean
more than the murky depths and unknown monsters of the ocean beneath us.