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His voice still echoes in my mind even after all this time. For a while, I actually believed that Dad didn't care about us, but my opinion changed every time we met at the end of the day, and he spoke to me so gently about how he wished he could be my age again, to be more childish. It wasn't as if I had been too childish, because I had to be quite reserved due to our reputation.
A priest's daughter cannot afford to have bad grades, smoke or drink, wear skirts shorter than knee length, or have male friends at that age. These were just a few of the unwritten rules of this sick society, about which I was to learn more later on, no matter how much my father valued appearances and tried to protect me from harm.
Real people
Fake people
Normal people
Abnormal people
For everyone, there is a category. Only for me, there isn't. I am the paradox of being both real and fake, normal and abnormal. However, my mother was always different from him. Maybe that's why it was easier for her to leave. She would always tell my father, “What do you expect of me? You haven't met me at church.” and that always made me wonder where they exactly met, but their love story remained a hazy mystery because they refused to reveal more, and the uncertainties tempted me to lend an ear to the rumors of gossiping tongues.
Here, in London, I saw her happier, more at ease, more... herself.
It was as if in all these five years, I had known a different mother, more fun-loving and nonconformist than the woman everyone had expected to be a priestess.
A priestess... a standard that never truly fit her, and with which she never identified in the end.
My mother was not meant to be a priestess. It was easier for her to be a normal woman.
I feel like all this turmoil inside me, I somehow inherited it from the woman who tried to suppress it her whole life... my mom.
And for what?
Love?!
What even is it?
Loving someone to the point of losing yourself? It's a crime, one that I almost committed in the past.
He wasn't special.
He wasn't different.
He was just bizarre, and his love was equally bizarre.
But after all that, I managed to break free from the weak Becca of the past by leaving it all behind. That’s when I found my escape from that unhealthy state of mind. My mom allowed me to join a gym, and guess what? It happened to be right next to an MMA training center, where I’ve been practicing this contact sport for two years now. Once sports became a routine, my life completely changed. If my immune system and I were at odds before, after a year, we became the best of friends. Gradually, my problems started to fade away as my body adapted to the exertion. I feel good physically and mentally because I expend enough energy there, and it helps me to stop overthinking.
However, today everything moves in slow motion, like a sad, silent movie. I sip my morning coffee with my mother’s urn on the table, regarding it as the most precious thing.
She didn’t want to be buried in the cemetery on the St. Giles’ property. After learning about her cancer, she had told us that she wanted to be cremated. Dad, obviously, didn’t agree with her decision, but he didn’t have a say in it.
Perhaps Mom gave up many things to be with dad, too many for me to fully grasp, but not the things she truly desired.
A month after receiving her diagnosis, she told me she wanted her ashes to be scattered in the Thames, from the Tower Bridge. At that time, I didn’t know if she was joking or being serious, but now, looking back, I will do it, even if it’s illegal.
Back then, I didn’t want to hear it because I denied my mother’s illness until the very last moment. I kept hoping for a recovery, desperately clinging to the last desperate solutions, and mom complied, even though she knew she was fighting a losing battle against the advanced stage four cancer.
Now, in the cold and quiet kitchen, with an urn full of my mother’s ashes on the table and my fingers curled around the cooling coffee mug, I painfully realize that I pushed her even harder, forcing her to undergo the treatment.
I haven’t changed, not even now.
I’m still the same selfish person I’ve always been.
“Fuck! Fuck! Fuuuck!” I scream and tremble, and before I realize that I’ve lost control, the half-filled coffee mug flies and shatters against the cupboard.
What have I done?
