Motherthing

by Ainslie Hogarth

I guess that’s what rage is: the point where your words fail the power of your emotions.

When a lab monkey doesn’t have a mother, a cigarette-smoking man in a white coat and horn-rimmed glasses will give the monkey a rolled-up pair of socks and the socks become their mother. Or, more accurately, the monkey needs a mother so badly that it can project enough mother things onto the socks that they do the trick. Become a Motherthing.

Maybe the couch does resent having to do this mothering, but it doesn’t let on, because it’s a better Motherthing than this real mother could ever be.

Depression becomes this house, where it’s thrived in one form or another for at least thirty years: dark, claustrophobic rooms where bad thoughts collect like tide pools, slimy, brackish hazards, impossible to avoid.

Maybe touching someone is the kindest thing you can do; making a person feel like it’s okay to touch them, that they’re touchable and not disgusting, is the easiest and best way to make a person feel good in the world.

He told me that suffering makes a person special, fills a soul with angular gems of transcendent knowledge, so many perspectives contained within each one.

He told me that night about his darkness: depression. How he got sometimes, how it was physical: waves of pain drowning him, or not him exactly, but the thing inside him that made him him, and all he could think about was destroying the vessel, the sinews, muscles, pulses, that kept him tethered to the pain, bisecting the vessel’s veins like a vanilla bean, burrowing a bullet into his brain.

Boys are boys and they do what they want. Women want things too sometimes, but mostly they’re just warm sensory boards for men to tweak and rub and learn about themselves and the world through.

Women want things too sometimes, but mostly they’re just warm sensory boards for men to tweak and rub and learn about themselves and the world through.

Touching Janet’s powdery hand has excavated even more of my jellied-salmon insides—the parts of me that want to grab her arms, pull them behind her, kick her straight out the door, bloodied stump arms still in my hands, beat her to death with them in the hallway, run out the front door with them, still flailing, terrify the parking lot pigeons so they whoosh up and take me with them.

i get her