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.

The bishop dispatches him to sell their stories, but the islanders know the sea is God. They know that religion is a pathetic performance, a plea for clemency by lost people. The sea laughs at such pleading. The Seancéibh is just a little way down from here. Wherever you are on the island, the water is always close.

Eventually the trying started to hurt me. The trying made my chest cramp and my heart dreary. After a while, the trying hurt more than not trying and so I stopped. I don’t know what I was looking for exactly. I was trying to feed a need I couldn’t name.

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 ill with many things and the waters are infected with the spoiled remains of the island’s men.

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.

know it’s selfish to go in and risk leaving some smear of wrongness in this place that has been, until now, free from my corrupting presence. Suddenly I’m stricken. It’s wrong to make Rachel be near me. To perpetrate myself on her and her home.

(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.)

feel so wide open since having the baby. When I was pregnant I felt so happy. I made beautiful things and it felt like the baby was with me as I created. Then they pull you open and they pull the baby out and they leave you like that.’

When she sleeps, I lean close and swallow the breath as it leaves her body. All night long I carry the baby, the thing that contains her entire spirit. Her happiness and her hope, all under my sway. I am their god. A quiet god. A loving god.

That’s what a baby is, I’ve come to see now. It is the mother’s whole soul extracted,

Why do death and ecstasy look so similar?