Trapped in Forever

29 ~ Incorporated Into The Stars

“You . . .” I said, slowly, feeling as the simple, minute word laid heavily against my lips, pursed on the tip of my tongue, too afraid to fall away, to be in a place where every action, sentence, and look was permanent to someone, and I swallowed, the breath in my lungs swirling, trapped behind bone and tissue, and the hopeful glint in my mother’s eye faltered, but remained nonetheless. “. . . You just happened to find some college pamphlets?” My voice was small, barely more than a hoarse whisper, but somehow it managed to float its way towards my mother, stripping her eyes of the faint optimism it held moments earlier.

“Well, not exactly . . .” she murmured, almost more to herself than me, her eyes quickly averting themselves from mine and focusing onto the pamphlets arrayed haphazardly on my keyboard, rereading each word, as if that would help somehow. She sighed then, her eyes still ogling those three letters that signified everything she wanted, alphabet letters arranged in total perfection, and lifted her chin, bringing her gaze back to me, but it wasn’t hopeful anymore. Now it was tired, exhausted even, as if now, with the GED pamphlets in view, I should’ve given up the foolish notion of being a model, now I was just being stubborn and unreasonable. I could hear those words being muttered to my father while they sat in bed, with her applying lotion to her arms and him waiting through the local news report for the weather. “Amanda—isn’t it time that you considered other options? I know you want to be a model but—”

When I interrupted her, breaking off her drained sentence with my own, my voice had changed, it wasn’t hoarse or quiet, barely above a murmur, but sharp, with edges that gleamed as they hit the air, swiping for their targets. “There is no but,” I blurted out, watching with a glimmer of satisfaction as my mother’s lips remained gapped, eyes slowly growing wide and incredulous. “This is what I want, Mom. This—” I gestured to the pamphlets, leisurely sliding off of my slanted keyboard—“is what you want! Not me!”

My mother was staring at me, almost as if that as I stood there, across the rug from her, I suddenly sprouted another head, but this one was different, not at all the good girl she raised. This head filled her words with a poisonous tone, spoke sentences that her angelic daughter never would, and did things that she couldn’t phantom her perfect daughter would do. It was then, when she gawked at me, like she never saw me before, that I heard his breath, quiet and slow, faintly fluttering away my poster. Each and every word finding his ears as much as ours.

“Well, Amanda,” she said, just as I feel the sinking feeling take root in the pit of my stomach, straining my ears for every inhale and exhale to remind myself that I wasn’t alone, that this wasn’t just me and mother, pouring salt into each other’s open wounds, that this was Orion, listening as we aired our dirty laundry into the midair. “I’m sorry that you feel that way, but I’m only trying to look out for you. Modeling is . . . is . . .”

“Is what I want to do,” I told her, finding her own exhaustion filling the empty crevices of my voice, my eyes fluttering close, blackness blurring her disappointed image. “I’m eighteen now. You can’t tell me what to do anymore.”

Her lips pursed together tightly, a thin, disappearing pink line that slipped beneath her skin and creased the skin on either side of her mouth, and her gaze automatically ran from mine, instead focusing on the blandness of bedroom walls, white closing in on us, and for a moment, I thought her eyes were glistening, gleaming like her nails or her diamond ring in the light. But then she blinked, squared her shoulders, and sucked in a dry breath through her nose. “I’m not trying to tell you what to do, Amanda,” she said, then, her voice just hardly above a whisper, unable to float beyond my ears, and if I closed my eyes, I swore I could hear that still, small voice quivering. “I’m just trying to protect you.”

And that was it. Before I had a chance to open my eyes, soak in the dimming sunlight as the clouds concealed the glowing, golden rays with their dark, fogged edges, keeping its brightness for themselves, and find my mother’s disappointed countenance staring back at me, waiting for something I didn’t think I could give her, or before I had even had the chance to say this, that even the most pathetic statements wouldn’t change my mind, even if her voice sounded as broken as the shattered glass of the window my father broke, trying to get us out of our fairy wings and into baseball; she was gone. Her gleaming blouse, neatly waved tresses, and peach, thin lips blurred into a swift, many-hued distortion across my floorboards, the creaks of their protests drowned out by the thwacking of her slippers against her heels, and I felt a slight breeze graze against my shoulder as she passed by me, a fleeting image of her face skimming past my eyes—her chin tight and reddening, eyes glued north like the needle of a compass, and then she was gone, leaving me to drown in her words, hoping they would make a difference, but I knew that they wouldn’t. I think, somewhere, within her, she knew this too.