Old Flame

by Molly Prentiss

What did you think you’d be? What do you really want? Who are you, actually, under all the pretenses you put up each day to prove that you’re deserving of being alive?

If this was a family, I wanted to say, where was the mother? Why were there only fathers, standing above us in suits, telling us what to do? Why did they give their sons bigger allowances than their daughters?

“Isn’t that what love is?” she said, with a new earnestness. “Two people making each other feel better about themselves?”

What did you think you would be? Did we think we would be here, drinking fourteen-dollar smoothies, watching all the humans morph into each other and into their surroundings, as if it were all just one giant Photoshopped image? Everything around us felt like both a promise and a threat. Capitalism disguising itself as wellness, as intelligence, as community, as grace.

“Freedom is overrated,” she said, reading my mind. “Responsibility to others, or to things, is what makes you matter, what grounds your life in reality.”

Sometimes I feel like my whole life has been a series of things I could have done but didn’t.”

It was about enjoyment and so we enjoyed. It was about food and so we ate. It was about life being life and so we lived.

I want to tell you a story, dear girl, about mothers. About how having lost one feels like a hole in your body, just above your belly button. About looking to fill that hole everywhere, in every person you meet, wondering, always: Will this person love me like she would have? Will this person love me even if I am vile, even if I cry, even if I am wrong, even if I embarrass myself, even if I am a disaster?

Your mother is everywhere, inside you and also in every woman who helps build you, who texts to see if you got home okay. Sometimes, she’s so omnipresent it feels like she might swallow you up.