Motherthing

by Ainslie Hogarth

Winter never lets you forget you’re alive. Maybe that’s why it makes people sad.

It’s unwise to stand out from quiet, middle-of-the-night dark. Like how your body has to imitate water to stay alive in it, arms and legs undulating with the waves to keep your head up and breathing. This quiet, middle-of-the-night dark could drown you if you didn’t conform to it completely.

The socks become a Motherthing, scribbles the cigarette-smoking lab coat man, who tastes his pen and continues writing: They can hug it and stroke it and put their cheek against it and it calms them down, really calms them down. The way a mother would. A real remarkable effect. The baby monkey’s heart rate decreases, blood pressure lowers, all the magic medicine a mother is.

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.

WE CHANGE INTO OUR PAJAMAS as soon as we get home because that’s what we always do, no matter who’s haunting the basement, a precious custom from our old life that we’ve managed to preserve here in hell.

[Abby nods, almost speaks but decides at the last second not to share the fact that she has no idea what he means by this sense of yourself. This thing inside you that makes you who you are. Abby didn’t have one of those. If she had any sense of herself at all, it was as a seed, carried by some shuddering and indifferent wind, waiting to be dropped into the place that would finally make her real.

It’d been such a relief to learn that there was more out there, God and prayers and miracles. And all I had to do was believe in it; believe in this world I couldn’t see. Believe in a hidden logic to the universe, an authority that unifies, that gives you the power to affect things: change your luck, change your destiny, because you’re devoted to a bigger purpose, a nebulous, sticky energy that exists between what you can see.