The First Time She Drowned

by Kerry Kletter

when you don’t have a mother, you don’t have a home, and when you don’t have a home, there’s nowhere to go when you’re sad or scared or alone, even in your own mind, there’s just nowhere to go.

one act of parental kindness across a history of cruelty can make a kid in here forgive everything that came before simply because they have been deprived of kindness for so long.

Sometimes it seems like everybody wants to put their noise into the world until you can’t have enough quiet to even know you exist.

Time has become a meaningless abstraction; there is only this moment and then the next. Sweating and then freezing, a stabbing so violent in my chest and ribs that I sometimes lose consciousness.

This idea that a flaw can be funny is new to me. I turn it over like something shiny.

I discovered that there are two kinds of death. There is ceasing to exist, usually accompanied by a funeral and loved ones in mourning. And then there is emotional death born out of necessity and measured solely by the absence of grief it causes: the turning off the lights of oneself in order to shut down the feelings of being alive.

Sometimes I would catch myself in the mirror, surprised to see someone staring back at me, a stranger whose face I struggled to connect as my own, whose body was visible and intact despite the feeling that I moved through the world as a ghost.

That’s the weirdest thing about being cut off from life. Everything gets washed out or muted or recedes into the background except for other people’s laughter. Other people’s laughter gets very loud and jarring. It penetrates. It is a reminder that other people live.

Like in all this time that she had been feeding me her rage and despair, depositing it into me like coins into a slot, she had never stopped to consider what might happen to all that hate.

which she had created was now bigger than her.

The only people who have room to worry about the future are those who aren’t fighting just to survive the present.

Suddenly I don’t even care that I fell, because of that brief moment when I stood, and I wonder if this is what other people seem to have that I do not—this courage to fall because they have the memory of standing.

That facing the truth of who my mother is hurts less than holding on to the illusion that she could ever give me what I needed.

part of being healthy is being able to hold and remember who people actually are instead of who we wish they were. It’s a daily struggle against a brain that tends to want to cling to fairy-tale hope, but it’s also the only way to guarantee a life surrounded by those who build rather than destroy. In the end, the loss is about letting go of what I never had in the first place.