‘All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does, and that is his.’

 - Oscar Wilde

You told me once, that one would never die as long as they lived on in others; immortal insofar as one carved out a space in another’s heart, bare hands prying through muscle and sinew, rupturing detritus-lined vessels to eke out a nook for oneself. How it wasn’t the sudden, violent process of twisting the dagger in the gut, but rather the slow settling of something over one’s shoulders, like it belonged there.

My hands - rich people’s hands, you used to say. Hands that had never known hard labor, or suffering. Before they came to know that, the first thing they knew was pain, swift and cutting, streaking through the grooves of my lifeline. The first time you did it, I was five; the misdemeanor- I do not recall. The motions cycle through in my mind now - the thin strip of bamboo suspended over my empty, exposed palm, then the fusion with my skin: a slash, a lit match. My palm gaping open for all to see. But I remember too, when tenderness held your hand. When you took my defaced hand in yours and slowly cleaned up the torn bits, tried as best you could to make my hand whole. 

Before the slit healed, you would do it again. 

I see you now, in myself: bloodied cuts on my hand a wet echo of the ones on my heart. How your love was much like Sisyphus rolling the stone up the hill, never truly complete. One day, I will take your hand in mine. I promise to go through the motions- clean it, dress it, bandage it up nicely. Because what are we if not a double-edged sword? One always cutting the other, cleaving until only bone is left.

And there you are again, in the fell clutch of time. Your back, hunched over the kitchen countertop;  a universe between your hands - gaping for the world to see. That night, your chopsticks sticky with molasses and soy sauce, dipped into my bowl of rice over and over, bringing sweet offerings of meat and egg. Your bowl: empty, save for the paltry morsels of rice, long washed down by the hunger gnawing away at your core. Then, barely full, you would scrape at the wok in the sink, until nothing was left of it except for the animals that it had drowned at your behest.

That time, when I had the gall to talk back with the tongue that I stole from you. There you were, in the flick of my tongue, and in the taut silence that followed after. Instinctively, you slashed your hand across my cheekbone, a hairline spool of blood uncoiling on my face, the illusion temporarily shattered. You know how the story ends. You and I: tainted reflections of each other, through the ever-dishonest looking glass. What more did I know, of the fault lines that cracked somewhere in between? 

It is then, that the true tragedy is made abundantly clear: the mother cannot absolve the child of the same fate as her. The child, knowing nothing more, will slowly mimic the mother; the monkey made to mimic the zookeeper.  The mother, knowing nothing more, will not stop the child until it is too late. The child’s umbilical cord is severed, and then it learns that it can survive without its mother. The child’s tongue is severed, and it learns that freedom is bought at a high price. 

Another tragedy - they come in droves now. My name, a vessel for what you never could have been. Expectations and wishes, heaped in abundance on a small child, barely tall enough to see over the counter of the cashier. The most beautiful part of my name, I used to think, was the one that you picked out. That is to say, all of it. One syllable: a knock of the tongue on the palate, before smoothening out into an exhale. You picked it because it was easy to remember, but to forget one’s progeny is not an easy thing. I recall now, how you would call me by anything else other than my own name. To grant me my birthright, then, is to remind yourself of what you should have become. To call my by my name, then, is to imbue me with a wish, a hope, for me to be what you might have been. It is understandable now, your selfishness - to save your child from the miserable hope of it all.

In another lifetime, we are happy. We exchange pleasantries, like mothers and daughters do. But how many pleasantries will we need to make up for the past? How many wounds will have to seal themselves closed before we begin the drudgery of reconciliation? In all the lifetimes, you are still my mother, and I am still your daughter - constant as the slow rise of the days. 

In another lifetime, we might be younger, young enough to still believe that our love can be flown on paper airplanes that reach the clouds; that our love can be tucked away in the handwritten note of a school lunchbox; that our love can be released just like the seeds of a mature dandelion breathe in the freedom of the wind, unshackled at last. 

In another lifetime, maybe the play of our life is not a tragedy after all - but a comedy. Perhaps people can find solace in our story, and carve out their own little nook in their hearts for us. You’d never been one for comedy, wincing whenever I put Seinfeld on, fearing the canned laughter of dead people. How you would demand that I turn it off, hands cupping your ears until one could not distinguish hand from ear - both the same shade of red, the kind that could devour entire houses in its wake. 

Sleep catches me by the wrist, or if it were softer, by the round of my shoulders. I close my eyes, the projector of my neurons firing reflected on the inside of my eyelids. The scene is set and fleshed out, me in a white, sterile hallway and you at the end of it. How I would run and run into infinity and you - always slipping through the twist of my hand. If this is heaven, I do not want it. I do not want my temptation, my regret, always evading my clutches like a terrible snap in the mirror, always at one’s disposal, yet always an inch further than my fingers can scrape. 

I’ll leave this story for the maggots to pick at, it should be done now. Your nook in my heart has been cleaned up, sterilized - for you to reside to the pulse of my heart, that betraying muscle. 

Come home; I’ve left a room for you, one you haven’t been in for ages.