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That sounds pathetic, but last night with Ani and Harper left me with some gaping wounds. I’d had to tear them open and let some of the poison out so they could heal. Properly this time.
There’s still an ache inside me, but I also feel freer than I did before, like when I finally know what’s wrong with a program I’m writing. I haven’t debugged it yet and I know there’s hard work ahead, but I’m satisfied because I can do this. I can make this program work.
I might be able to make me work the way I should. To make my life what it should be.
I glance over at the clock. It’s still dark outside. Long before I need to be at Lydia’s. I’ve got three hours before I can start work. It sounds like a backslide, but it’s not merely about business. It’s about being in a place where I feel comfortable. I want to be at Lydia’s because I belong there, because it’s where I get to be around her and Heath and Ria and Ye Joon. It’s where I intend to play around with Emma and see if I can make something new.
I hear my mother out in the kitchen. She’d been asleep when I came in the night before. We haven’t talked in days, so she likely doesn’t even know I’m here unless she saw that I hung my jacket on the hook by the front door.
I think seriously about lying here until she’s gone. It would be so much easier, but I’ve vowed to not be this person anymore. When I was a child she should have been the one to bend to my needs, but I worry she wasn’t capable of it.
My eyes close as I ask myself some hard questions. Do I want a relationship with her?
What do I owe her? Do I owe her anything at all at this point? So much of my damage was inflicted by her.
But what if she couldn’t help it because there was something chemically wrong with her brain?
I don’t owe her. Children do not owe their parents a relationship, especially if it was toxic at some point, but I find myself sitting up and then wrapping a robe around my body. After a trip to the bathroom, I’m walking down the hall. I can smell coffee. The same brand she’s made since I was a child. She’ll be drinking it out of the same mug she’s had since I was fifteen and someone had given it to her as a Secret Santa gift at the office.
Is this what her life turned out to be? An endless round of routines? Wake up at six. Coffee and toast. Make it to the subway platform by 8:15. Work. Lunch. Subway ride home. Come home and microwave dinner. Watch TV until she falls asleep. Start over.
She hadn’t been able to throw herself into something new when my dad had died. She couldn’t take off and find herself. She’d had me, and she’d sunk into a routine that I then blasted when I was old enough to. I remember all the times I told her how boring her life must be and that I wouldn’t get caught in it the way she had.
She wasn’t the only problem.
I stop at the corner of the kitchen. She’s sitting at the small table, the mug of coffee in her hand as she stares out the window at the slowly encroaching light. Her hair is in a neat bun at the back of her head. She always wears it up when she’s working. I want to see it down, to brush it and see if we can find a new look. The way she did when I was a kid.
We don’t talk anymore. We fight. I push. She pulls.
What if we can find a way out?
“I like this time of morning,” I say quietly so I don’t startle her.
She glances my way. “I didn’t know you ever saw this time of morning. There’s coffee if you like.”
It’s as much of an invitation as I’m going to get. I grab a mug and pour some in. “The whole sleeping routine is a recent development. You know I used to wake up at five every morning so I could be sure I had everything ready for school.”
“Yes, that’s a habit you picked up after CeCe made you work for her in the afternoons and evenings,” she says, her mouth turning down. “You would do your homework in the early mornings. It was too much for a young girl.”
I hadn’t been so young, and it hadn’t been too much since I’d managed to do it all. I don’t mention that a lot of my homework had been done with Benjamin while CeCe drank a martini and discussed all the reasons I would never need algebra.
