“I want a cat.”
“You want a cat that will sit on your lap,” mother intoned.
This is so metaphorical, I thought. It wasn’t even a question; to her, a pet was to be loved by.
“We’re moving through time,” said Donnie Darko, and he wasn’t technically wrong.
“Love to be loved,” said the Bible.
“I always wondered why I felt that way, and then the scripture taught me a reason,” said mother.
She does love me, she does love me, I think she really thinks she loves me, she’ll do anything to be loved by me, she wants me to sit on her lap she wants me to be her little clinging vine.
My whole life is just a pretty self-portrait but unfortunately it is starting to look a lot like Dorian Gray. She couldn’t have known that was the curse on her bloodline (the curse on every bloodline), the taking up of sins like water into cool, young, tender, virgin roots.
I have become so ugly and I want a baby. Want to make a clean part of me and iron out all the creases but what if it looks like me.
Mother calls me sweet pea and offers me my own soft green flesh in a soup that needs salt. There is great concern in that house for perimeter defense, but she is Oedipally blind and her husband looks just like my father and is forgiving as a foolish new-testament god.
One day we will all be better than each other and we’ll look down from our towering pedestals and see each other clamoring at the bases and gnawing on our juicy red roots like vampires. May we move through time and never stop.
