I'm wading in a pool I never learned how to swim in.
My mother is strong because she has to be. I am strong because I know nothing else.
[inspired to share something a bit more personal in place of my usual fiction]
I’ve only ever seen my mother cry once—at a funeral. For a man she claimed she didn’t know.
I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not.
Here, some bread, momma would say and I’d shove it into my mouth. Pennies aren’t things you should suck on. I was only five then. Enjoyed the metallic taste of copper on my tongue so much I learned to swallow past the bitter lump in my throat with a bit of wheat and a sip of water.
I think it was the salt of it I wanted most.
Stop crying, or I’ll give you something to cry about, momma says to me sometime around the age of nine. Followed by a lashing to the behind. Bile rises up and coats the floor, like the tears pricking at my eyes, like the penny I wanted to hash back up and suck on some more.
For old time’s sake. Maybe, too, to calm the nerves.
My aunt dies. I’m in college now. I sit in the dining hall surrounded by laughing strangers, nursing a half-empty pint of ice cream as sorrow brims and blazes a wet path down my face.
And instead of feeling more human, I feel wrong somehow, guilty and weak. I chastise myself for the momentary lapse of vulnerability.
The sick comes for dad, too. Cancer.
My parents call to give the news. I’m doing my makeup in my apartment bedroom. Want to look like a fairy, something ethereal, unreal. I’m taking selfies on my laptop cam as they talk about treatments.
He’s lying in a hospital bed.
I’m thinking about how there’s not enough highlight on my face.
Something needs to sparkle.
Somewhere in the fog, my sister says I don’t feel enough. She doesn’t know about the pennies.
Or the salt.
Or the things I’ve been taught to burrow deep inside my gut.
Years have passed and I’m beginning to wonder where does that penny go? Where do the pain go? And what if the penny don’t want to be swallowed whole and forced down? What if it want to come up?
What could I do if it did? What could I have done but let it?
Graduation comes and goes. I’m back home sleeping on the couch.
Three months go by like that, the humming of a ceiling fan and my weary thoughts, my late night companions. Resume revisions after revision. To what end?
Something finally sticks, but it’s not the job I want.
During my interview, momma is rushed to the hospital. I’m smiling at two total strangers and momma is having trouble breathing. My world is suddenly upturned.
Everybody else is worried, but I have to be strong.
I’m like my mother in that way.
Tears well up, but never fall, and I wonder where the pain goes once I push it all back down. I wonder if it’ll overflow one day. Pry itself out. Take everything with it.
I wonder if—like momma—they’ll only find me only after the damage has been done.
The last time I remember crying I was miles away from home. Curled up in bed sheets in a place where I didn’t belong. Just off the cusp of 23. Teeth gritted and shoulders pressed high up to the ears to fight off the cold and dampen the sound through those thin walls.
Something about feeling alone. About anger. About not feeling loved. About reciprocation.
I’m thinking about momma, again. I always am. The way she built her walls up so high no one noticed the way she was grasping out for someone or something to keep hold of.
I’m finding that tears are a lot like blood. You cut deep enough, it flows freely. But not where anyone can see.
Once the dam is broken, it don’t just stop. One crack expands, splitting you right down the center and everything just bleeds. Floods, I mean.
My biggest fear is drowning. Not fire, not ice, not being buried in the earth.
I’m afraid of being held on all sides so tight it’s hard to breathe or come up for air. Flailing helplessly. That sinking feeling of despair, relinquishing the last bit of control I have left.
I must hold it in, patch up the crack and pray it holds strong a little while longer. I’m not ready to break apart just yet. I’m not sure I’ll ever be.
I suppose there’s no happy ending to the story. There’s just all the pain in the gut that I don’t know how to get rid of except to spew it across the walls and floor and lose my footing in it and drown.
There’s an entire ocean of fear and silence and feigned indifference churning inside of me now. I don’t know who I am without it. I’ve only ever been taught to swallow.
I never learned: how to swim.
-fin-
This is for the ones—like me—who fear the flood.
What line really stuck with you?