yellow

converse, cacti and wallpaper

converse, cacti and wallpaper

My mother apologizes for cracks he has caused and she mumbles I love you, the stale air of liquor and cigars on her breath. The poetry she scribbles on her pant legs is almost as deep as the hollows on her cheeks, the words almost as dark as her eyes. My father screams good bye, and it tastes like salt and smells like bruised skin. Seeing him drive with everything I've ever loved; my cat, my grandmother's necklace and my mother's heart. My mother apologizes as she bangs her head on the wall and wraps herself in the few clothes he left behind.

It's two years later and the scribbles have transferred from her pant legs to her bedroom walls. My mother's hands are calloused, like her heart, and her veins are pumping with words instead of blood, for she has spilled it all on the bathroom floor. She writes about the pressure building up in the veins that lace under the delicate skin of her inner wrist, the urge to cut her temples when she gets her post-crying migraines. My mother lives off of tofu and protein shakes, feeding me a similar diet. The flavorless taste of the food she feeds me is like my life, bland and without meaning. Unsatisfying. My mother's sobs keep me up at night, along with the blasting of their wedding tape. He sent us pictures of him and his new girlfriend, twenty-seven and gorgeous. She looks like my mother before he left.

It's three years later and there's nothing but shattered memories littering the floor. In my living room there's still the empty cup of coffee he left, and if you were to turn on the TV it'd still be on his favorite channel. My room smells of abandonment, and I look like it too. All of my clothes too small from my failed attempt at washing them, and my lunches usually consist of a condiment on bread. My mother is empty, nothing but collar bones and wrists. I am fading along with her, my complexion growing pale, and my skin growing loose on my bones. I am becoming yet another wall decoration. The small cactus my father got my mother the week before he left is yellowing, even though I water it every now and then. It's dying; the same way their love did.

It's been five years and our house is covered in scribbles. She's dropped three jean sizes and has lost her mind, along with her daughter. Her ribs are easily counted and her hair is graying. Her bones are as brittle as her heart, shattering like the glass of the mirror in the bathroom. She hasn't left her room in two months. I leave sandwiches outside her door, but more often then not they mold outside. The ink that covers the walls looms behind my eye lids; warnings of love and death and this all consuming darkness. The word I have labeled my mother with does not make an appearance on these walls, yet they all have the same after taste. Depressed.

It's been seven years, I'm fifteen now. My mother has forgotten my name. Her hair is falling out and the shadows under her eyes are the color of the charcoal smudges on my hands. I've begun to sketch, yet all I can seem to draw is a woman, fading slowly, shrinking in size and mental presence. She talked to me today, asking who I was and why I was in her home. Her frantic words and crazed eyes reminded me of the almost desperate return of the tide to the shore, filling up the room. Her absence hits me harder than the car did last year. I cover the scars with clothing. She still doesn't know. I bought myself a pair of yellow converse.

It's been nine years, I'm leaving here soon. I got a scholarship to Washington University. For track. My bones are being hollowed out by the essence sucking thing that dwells inside my mother. She's gone, all but an exoskeleton of the woman I used to call mommy. Empty lullabies echo through the house. She's humming the past as she writes about the future. A future of black and the smell of earth. I can't wait to leave. This house smells of dust and being forgotten, and it whispers with the lacunas in my childhood. I never learned to ride a bike, or how my parents fell in love. My mother never taught me what mothers are supposed to teach their daughters. My father never chased away a boy, or held me when I cried. My lips are dried over tears that I have shed for my mother. My mother, who apologizes with each sweep of the blade across her wrist. It's dull, like her mind. I saw her wrists. They are criss-crossed with ribbon of white and red.

It's ten years later, and I'm kissing her wet cheek as a nurse takes her bag from my hand. I covered the walls in yellow wallpaper and threw out her blades. I'm letting go of my mother. The hospital bill is being sent to my father's address. He will pay for what he has caused. My mother is no longer human, merely a bag of bones, her heart no longer hers. My yellow converse scuff the ground as I hop in my car and start driving away from small town no where in upstate New York. With each mile away from there, a piece of my crumbled mind falls back into place.

It's fifteen years later, and the word that was never written on the walls of my old home, but etched into my mother's being, rolls of my psychologist's tongue. My converse pause their kicking. Flashes of the shriveled yellow cactus and my parents dying marriage, as a word that tastes like inheritance and smells like the sea of my eight year old eyes is being slammed behind my eyelids. The word that is worn by my mother's calloused hands and has my last name carved into each edge of the word, each tale of my family woven into the crevices and gaps between the letters. The word that has been passed onto me, along with my mother's sorrowful dark eyes and my father's mournful light hair. Depression.