My mother died when I was young, she drowned herself. I’ve written about this incident countless times, I know, but I’m writing again for myself. My mother died when I was young, she drowned herself. This is what they say. My father told me that she drowned herself because she was crazy but also because of me, she simply loved me too much or she was afraid of me, she couldn’t control the maternal bond with her son, she didn’t trust her body near mine, my father never really knew what, he only told me that she was crazy and it was because of me. She was crazy when he met her, he said. He told me once that she used to have nightmares, premonitions, she repeatedly endured the phenomena until she couldn’t live any longer, she just couldn’t take it, neither in this world nor the next. This is what my father told me. My father the hypocrite. My father told me this when I was seven, he hardly speaks to me at all but he told me this back when I was seven, he said my mother never mentioned to him what the dreams were about but only that they were terrible, our son is cursed, she told him, he’s awaiting some dark fate, some terrible future. I wake thinking of my mother and try to imagine that midnight pool she waded into, I try to find it in my mind. A moonlit expanse, a solitary woman exposed to the night, serene, a woman dwarfed by trees, awash in the light of the moon. This notepad is small in proportion to the desk and I’m hungry, I need to eat and I’m also thirsty, I remember the rotted bulbous tree root from my dream and my appetite is abated, at least for now, how is it possible to be alive and feel dead at the same time, I think of her, my mother, and I write in the notepad now fully aware of the scab on my hand, for it sets directly beneath the pen, a blister, each diagonal thrust of the pen reminds me of my mortality. Leaking and bulbous. I wake with my mother floating about the pool of my conscience and a bulbous tree root rotting, strong but rotting, a bulbous scab on my hand and a dark pool whereby my mother sent her last breath upward in a spring of slow bubbles up to her moon, itself just a bubble. I was seven. She was twenty-eight, and now I’m already half-past her final age. In some respects, a grown man. At this rate the scab will never become a scar, it will never heal, opened and reopened and reopened and reopened and the motherless child will never become a man despite his intellect but instead perhaps whittle himself away scab by scab, the image of my mother more like the dramatization of an image rather than the actual image, her body floats, I can’t remember what she looks like and I try to imagine what she wore that night, if she wore anything at all, bulbous tree root rotting but strong, what she wore floating dead in that lake, that secret pond in my mind. I see soft pink fluttering at the edges of the water’s surface, or perhaps the air’s surface, her hair too dark to see by moonlight, her hair shimmering equally with the water, the soft pink of her thin gown two shades paler than her skin, my mother, face down, forever, my mind’s eye directly above her, looking down, the eye of the moon. My father blames me, he’s always blamed me and I cannot hate him for it, I cannot blame anyone for blaming me for causing the quake, a bulbous tree root a scab a bulbous tree root seven a blame, a moon eye—
truthfront 