Nothing about it ever felt like love.
It felt like habit—two people keeping a calendar appointment neither of them wanted to cancel.
Our conversations were clipped.
Courteous.
Too quick.
When the conversation slowed down at all, it was only because she started talking about him.
My father.
Still in jail.
Still a legend in her heart.
Still the love of her life, even after all this time.
She wrote him letters every week and got on her knees to pray for him every night. She had his pictures in gold frames all over her apartment. When she spoke of him, his name was a holy symbol instead of a criminal that shattered us. To her, he was not a man who stole her joy and future.
He was still her addiction.
And she shot him into her system daily—on purpose. Smiling. Crying. Humming Billie Holiday as the needle slipped in.
And as awful as it was to watch, I deeply resented her for it too.
For loving a man who broke everything.
For choosing that heartbreak again and again, instead of choosing herself.
Instead of choosing. . .me.
Yet now. . .sitting in Kenji’s bed, staring at the untouched pillow where his head should have rested, I felt the cold press of something terrifying in my chest.
Shit.
I was beginning to understand my mother more than I’d ever wanted to. Not just intellectually, but viscerally. Down to my marrow.
I was beginning to comprehend the way she had given him her heart.
I was understanding that deep, aching worship. That kind of obsession that turned absence into scripture.
The way she dressed up and waited.
She had been in love with a man who didn’t come home.
And now I was lying in a man’s bed, wondering if I would spend my life waiting too. The thought made me sick. . .but I knew I wasn’t going anywhere. . .I was too far gone to leave Kenji. . .he was deep in my bones now and I didn’t want his presence to ever leave me.
Fuck. How did that happen? Am I my mother now? No. I can’t be. Right?
I clenched the sheets in my fists.
I didn’t want this legacy. Didn’t want to be the daughter of a woman who waited. Didn’t want to become the woman who waited too.
Yet. . .for Kenji. . .I would wait. . .
That realization shocked and horrified me the most.
