"I don't share," he growled right into my ear, his heavy breath hitting the base of my throat.
"I'm not yours." I hissed back.
He stepped closer, a smirk appearing on his face like all he was feeling at this moment was amusement. My patience was thi...
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Dark clouds formed a blanket over my head as I walked through the many tombstones. The path was one I had memorized since the early days I had learned to walk but only took once a year. Exceptions prove the rule, they say, and this visit was one of those. I knew my father visited her grave more than just on her death day, but he had never taken me with him. Because I had asked him not to.
As a kid, it was hard to watch him cry to concrete and dirt until his eyes were red. As an adult, I started questioning why I had never had tears streaming down my face.
Was I the weird one? Was something wrong with me because I could not shed a single tear for the woman who had birthed me? I didn't know, and sometimes I rectified it by remembering that I had not known this woman at all. She was as good as a stranger walking by me on a random Thursday. She was only memories of other people that I had formed in my head into a real human.
Of course, I was sad that I had never gotten the opportunity to meet her, to spend time with her, to talk to her. To just hug her. But I didn't know how it was to have a mother in the first place. It was like asking a person who had been blind their whole life if they missed seeing. I only knew what it was supposed to be like from schoolmates, family, and TV shows.
Sometimes I wondered if my inability to cry made me heartless or ungrateful. Was it wrong that I couldn't mourn her the way my father did? His grief was always there, like a ghost that haunted our home. I couldn't blame him. Not when he had lost his only love.
There was a time when I had tried to like the things she liked. I did the things that were her way of occupying her time. I thought maybe that way, my father would be happy to see a part of his late wife in his daughter. Like an incarnation, but not quite. I realized later on how wrong I was. It made my father happy, yes, but I felt the aftermath of that bad choice when I realized I had turned myself into a shell filled with my mother's essence.
I loved books like she did, but while she always searched for that cheesy love story, I liked to solve mysteries or just jump into other realms. She had loved flowers, but roses adorned our house when it was peonies and carnations that I adored.
My father would smile wistfully when he saw me with a romance novel or tending to the rose bushes. It was as if, for a fleeting moment, he saw her again through me. That look in his eyes which was a mixture of pain and happiness, made me think I was doing the right thing.
I was losing myself in an attempt to resurrect her. It took me a while to understand that I didn't need to mimic her to honor her memory. I didn't need to erase myself to keep her alive.
It was only when I moved out of that house that I started to do things the way I wanted. Limits were set nonetheless, but I no longer had my father's expectant eyes on me or the urge to please him by letting my mother's memory live on.
