Where I End

by Sophie White

Thing 2. I had children and felt the terror of my own power to destroy them. Thing 3. I became a mentally ill mother and have experienced the desperate shame that comes with this. I have felt deranged with love for my children and deranged with fear that my illness will harm them. I have known what it’s like to have delusional thoughts spread like mould in your mind. The thoughts spread among your ordinary thoughts, masquerading as reality until you don’t know what’s you and what’s It.

My mother. At night, my mother creaks. The house creaks along with her.

The bishop dispatches him to sell their stories, but the islanders know the sea is God.

Island mothers outside the shop reached for their children and their children shook them off with impatience, sure in the knowledge that the mother was always at their back ready to lay loving hands. Nothing ever reaches for me.

I suppose I cried when I was younger but stopped when nothing came of it.

Dada is the most alive of us I think. He hogs all the feelings in this withered house. He is swollen with guilt and pressed down with disappointment. He leaks tears like bilge water. It’s a relief when he goes.

The island made people do things, said the old people. And maybe, yes, for the island to remain so cold to what it has witnessed, it must have some hand in it.

Without it in his eyeline constantly, it is easier for him to recast this thing as a tragic ailing wife and mother. He doesn’t have to look at it every day. It doesn’t hover nearby at all times, ruining his life.

Her body is willing things into being, her baby and her milk and her art. She is like the sea, constantly churned up and moving. In comparison, I am blank. Empty like the island, this hole in the ocean.

Apparitions are scary but the real horror is to be found in people.

That’s what a baby is, I’ve come to see now. It is the mother’s whole soul extracted, freed from her body and out of her control.

Whatever I am, you made me so, Mother mother.

This is where it ends. Where I end.