Tags
abandon, alcohol, depression, drawing, family, fiction, hopeless, life, mother, relationship, short story, son, thoughts
Looking up, wearing a disheveled ragged apparel, Ma stood by my desk.
Polluted with sadness, the air gushed down my throat, my lungs engulfing the commotion.
“I need money,” she spit out in a thick southern accent. This is the first time I actually heard her speak in her normal voice.
Dumbfounded, I just stood there staring at this woman who gave birth to me. Did she really give birth to me? This was the woman?
This lady sharply squinted at me. There was a long silence.
Widening her eyes as she continued to peer at me, she took a deep breath, and without stammering, she spoke again, “I can’t be your mother. I am too fucked up. You don’t understand. Your father–“
Without even thinking about it, I mechanically walked over to my bed, lifted up my mattress, picked up a folded piece of paper, and handed it to her.
Ma gently grabbed the piece of paper as she rose her eyebrows.
She stared at it. It was the drawing I drew of us walking home together from the bus stop in first grade.
She ripped it in half– not with anger but with a heavyhearted tone.
“I can’t be your mother.”
I felt nothing.
I felt apathy.
I didn’t feel sadness or anger or anxiety.
There was nothing to feel. This was the first time I felt aloofness towards everything: objects, people, and emotion.
Hell, at this point I did not even feel alone. Just a raw emptiness washed over me.
Looking into her eyes, eyes I once thought were beautiful because of their glossiness, were glassy because of sadness. The blueness I saw in her eyes as a child, were not blue in fact, but were a pale grey color with a blue-ish tint.
They weren’t beautiful.
They were just sad eyes.
I couldn’t mutter a sound. My ribs ached.
“Where’s your money, Rick?”
Pointing on top of my closet, she walked over and reached up. There she found the pile of slim paper denoting the government’s currency.
I knew; I knew why she needed the money but I just let her have it anyways.
Ma’s sad eyes looked up at me. Then she turned around was heading out of the door.
Automatically, I blabbed out, “You know tomorrow is my birthday, right?”
Swirling around, she placed half my money on my desk and swirled back around.
Speaking under her breath, she quietly murmurs, “Is it? Have I really been gone for 8 years?”
And she walked out.
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