a shoutout to the finest author and my biggest inspiration nicegreengrass
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Twenty days.
Twenty days into driving to the suburban region every day with my mother to shop for spare groceries and paying for everything we did not need and could not afford, from tomatoes to cheese to chocolate boxes in colored wrappers that I did anything but know the name and brand of, the paper wrapped around peeling off at the edges to reveal a dark black blotted with ugly nuts in between, and how neither mom nor I could ever eat dark chocolate, and knowing the fact never complained or asked the other questions about the things we stole off high rows and cabinets and slammed down the counter like they were our belongings in the first place, the counter lady offering a very tender glare before calculating away and passing us a bill.
It always took mother a minute or two pondering over whether she should turn around and walk away and never come back again, the small shabby notes in her luxury black wallet she carried everywhere to show off being rich enough to afford one some day clutched between her manicured nails, painted and rubbed off in the perfect shape and cleaned from the work she had asked the lady at the salon right behind our house to do on it ; and she would boast them off before placing the credit card instead of money at the counter, offering the lady a smile as her bottom lip quivered and gave her away. We are not what we used be, every time I hear my shoes shuffling against the tiled floor that adds up a stain that the housemaid fails to wash off every other day, I feel a part of me duplicating myself for the next, every day takes with it a part of me from myself; and in turn, you. What do I do if I have nothing left to offer but you, Are, what do I do if I prefer to give the heart that slows down when it feels your presence and the liver I burn with the cigarettes I copy off of your new boyfriend and the lungs it turns black before you. What do I do if my love for you can bring with it death. I wonder at times, Are, does a love end where the living does.
Where does a love end, if not when you stop taking my name.
Meraki. They named you Meraki. On first of January at zero colon zero, which I am to learn four years after you told me this on your eighth birthday - when everything was still okay - is only partially true, because your mother had been at the hospital right at zero colon zero and you were yet to meet the sight of the white sheets you were to stick to at first, red from the blood that is smeared on your body because you have bloomed out of it, eyes so small the holes can never witness the world with you in it even if you open them and hands and feet and limbs so small you do not leave the body of the woman who bore you. Where does a love end, Are, if not when a woman and a man plant themselves into the past of themselves, more permanent than any scarf or house or the ring on your last finger from ever since you were a child can make them.
Where does a love end, Are, if not when a mother gazes at her child for the first time and realises that you are not a new creation, but a part of herself that she lost. The dearest one.
And a year later I am to learn, that they named you Meraki because they meant it, because every time your father pressed himself against your mother, the scent of his perfume doing away with the sickly smell of her makeup, he left behind a mark - a blister or a bruise or a slap against the cheek maybe - and when your mother truly bore you, with your features outlining those of the woman who bawled in agony on the night she was the happiest because she saw herself as she had never before, because a mirror duplicates the picture of a human that he may or may not find pleasing - but the child is when a mother finds herself pretty, it's when a human knows they love what they own, and they love what is themselves. They named you Meraki because she saw that they had left part of themselves in a body bloomed around a seed, that they had cut themselves open and molded you from the finest of what they held so dear, that after they had you, the universe found it so unfair it robbed them of their humanity. And your happiness.
