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He’s…functioning.
Moving forward.
As for Mom and me…
Well, how can I blame her or judge her for being so distant, when I go through my days like a zombie? Only difference is I have a Mason to distract myself. A purpose… even if that purpose is feeling more futile by the day, as he continues to spiral and fade away before my very eyes.
But it’s better than… than that. The thing I keep out. The unbearable agony that comes when I remember half of me is fucking missing. Gone without a trace. Likely fucking dead in a ditch somewhere, or floating face down in a shallow river at the bottom of a ravine.
Or, worse, being tortured and abused and raped and who the fuck knows what else.
Meanwhile, here I am, sitting in a cushy house with both of our parents, eating cold Chinese take-out when she could be starving, telling my parents I’m gay like it amounts to anything actually meaningful other than, oh wait?—
I’m the only kid they have left.
So much for their heteronormative wedding dreams coming true.
So much for grandchildren, seeing as I’m pretty sure I won’t have any.
Scowling at my stupid thoughts, I stab my fork into a piece of chicken, the metal creaking between my fingers.
“Bubs,” Mom chokes out, from where she’s crouched down next to my chair, and I have to blink a couple times to ensure I’m not just hallucinating.
So lost in my head, I didn’t even hear her move.
“I’m gay,” I say out loud for the eighth time in my life. It just feels empty now.
A tremulous smile stretches across her face, and I find myself surprised when little cracks don’t form across her pale, too-tight skin. Where mine feels like rubber, hers looks like porcelain on the cusp of shattering.
Thick tears bubble up around her lashes when she reaches for me, and my fork drops with a clang, rice tumbling across the table. She hauls me into her arms like I weigh nothing at all, when she’s the one who has a carton of strawberry flavored Ensure next to her plate because eating hasn’t exactly been a priority this last year and a half.
Thin arms wrap around me with vice-like strength that is borderline painful. My bones protest, grinding against each other, chafing against my muscle and flesh.
I can’t remember the last time she hugged me…
She hovers and she worries… but it’s from a distance. The second I’m in her sights—the second she’s assured I’m home and safe—she pulls away again.
And I wonder if she’s having the same thoughts—the same realization—because her grip on me tightens impossibly more.
I can’t breathe.
I don’t want to.
If I do, I’ll feel the hands now cupping my cheeks, and I’ll smell her skin, and I’ll remember everything I’ve lost.
I’ll remember that she’s hugging me so tightly, like she’s terrified I’ll disappear, because she can’t hug her.
Mom loves me, she loves me. I know this.
If she didn’t, she wouldn’t be hounding me to check in every five minutes that I’m not under this roof.
But it does little to erase that little voice whispering in the back of my head, that she’s not secretly wishing I was someone else.
Wishing…it was her daughter instead who was spared from whatever force swooped into our lives and tore our family apart.
We stare at each other until her face blurs into something indistinguishable, and the emotion clogging my throat gets so dense I feel like I might throw up. And before I’m even aware of what I’m doing, I’m prying myself away.
Dad calls after me. Mom reaches for me. I even think I hear her fall to her knees, but I’m already gone.
