On the Savage Side

by Tiffany McDaniel

A sage was a person. Someone who is wise. Spends their time thinking about infinity and space and frosted windowpanes and cracked glass.”

“For without patience, you will always be at odds with the task before you.”

A witch is merely a woman who is punished for being wiser than a man. That’s why they burned her. They tried to burn away her power because a woman who says more than she’s supposed to say, and does more than she’s supposed to do, is a woman they’ll try to silence and destroy. But there are some things that not even fire can destroy. One of those things is the strength of a woman.

When he turned around, I realized spiders come out in the daylight and they wear official clothes to try to cover up who they are at night. But you can’t cover up the eyes that look like black oil is caught there.

“Oh, I’d say you were a world of drifting secrets.” I crossed the top sections of her hair. “That you’re as primal as the sun. A daughter of knots. A cat on the linoleum washing her tooth.” She laughed louder. “What else, Arc?” “Oh, a sip of warm tea.”

A woman who is hard to tame is a woman who is easy to blame.

I wanted to leave my old life behind as easy as leaving a cup on the counter and walking off. I asked the river if this was possible. And she said everything but the word yes and the word no. Instead, she was a friend, a sister, an other who then became myself. I knew then that the migration of us was tied to the migration of the ripples.

“What they don’t tell ya in the history books is that war is fought with sober intention but not always with sober minds.”

When that didn’t happen, I started to think it was because she didn’t love me enough. I started to hate her. But the more I hated my mother, the more I hated myself. Those things are connected, you know. And even when I’m in a room full of people, I am always astonished at how lonely I can be, because the one person I need isn’t there. A daughter is a woman lost at sea. A mother is the one who saves her. But if she’s not there, the daughter will always be lost.”

A mother’s hands are hourglasses to her children. Our lives fall into yours as we pass the sands of time to you. I give you the grains of my unspent days and enough time to look back on a moment we both remember with love.

I thought that by making myself sick, too, I could save her.

Our whole childhood when Daffy was alive was spent imagining. Imagining eating birthday cake, hearing violins, and living a life better than the one we had. That’s all I was doing after she died. I was turning the savage side beautiful so she could live again. I did the things I loved, but I also did the things she loved, like planting flower bulbs. Daffy dug in the ground to put something in it. I dug to take something out. The artifacts left behind. It was me who Tam saw swimming in the pool. Me who ran up to John to get thirty-five dollars to be on Big Gray’s team. Who Daffy became was the side of myself who first did the drugs, so I could have someone else to blame. Daffy was my addiction, fully formed and personified in a separate entity who was always and forever me.

Lives lost to addiction are not always because the victim was the addict. Sometimes you die because the person you love is one. In Daffy’s case, that was our mother.

They’ll say our true killer was addiction itself. Addiction. Defined as giving in to something that is known to be harmful. Books will be written about it. Important voices will go on TV, documentaries will be filmed, and someone will win a Pulitzer Prize for humanizing what was already human. Who we were as women will be lost to a whole conversation about addiction itself.

I made the choice to take the needle, but I will say an addict was a child once, too. We had hopes and dreams of being something more. Our dream wasn’t to give ourselves away. That much is true.

Daffy and me used to think that everything in the world was made out of and from a woman. Now I think the universe must be, too, because I feel I am time and space itself. The stars, the planets, pooling in my collarbone until I am energy.

I’d like to say that on the savage side, there was love. Love for us, love from us, love between us. We mattered, but no one will much think of that before thinking we were just addicts and prostitutes and weak-minded women who are easily gotten rid of and even easier forgotten.