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.

They know that religion is a pathetic performance, a plea for clemency by lost people.

The gaze of the house is now unnerving. It has been gagged, the eyes and mouth stuffed shut with the stacked splintered rock. The straight-edged lines are steely stitches that have sewn our house closed. Inside is worse.

In my bed, the first sound of the morning tears the silence and finds me.

Neglect only piles more jobs on.

The island people are all cowed and crumbling, as though parts of the island have become dislodged and are moving about the place.

Even the children of the island are calcified. Their cries and laughter die in their throats.

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 is hostile; the seas murder the men and regurgitate them for us to see and know what’s coming for us all.

The sea didn’t love me—I am not stupid, no one loves me—but it didn’t ignore me. When I was younger, in bed at night, I swaddled myself in the blankets trying to make a tight embrace, but the exertion required ruined the illusion. In the sea, I didn’t have to drive this embrace around me. The sea swarms me, reaching up my body as I make my way in. The sea wants me.

On many days it would be certain suicide. But when the waves have turned the right direction and they aren’t thrashing too much, I get in and I feel like a different thing.

The sea is death reanimated.

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.

I have been acutely disturbed by our encounter. Utterly unhinged. I apply words to her that I’ve never had call to use. She is gorgeous, beautiful, alive and delicious.

(Hope, I’ve come to learn, can be a noose. When we hope, we willingly, blithely, put our heads in a sadistic coil and wait to be hanged. I hoped for things when I was younger—pathetic things—and was always left swinging.)

If she were not so empty, I would be full. I would be boiled pink with love like Rachel’s baby. Instead I am an echo.

She is like the sea, constantly churned up and moving. In comparison, I am blank. Empty like the island, this hole in the ocean.

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.