What if she hadn’t hated me—just herself, or life, or her circumstances—and I spent all this time misinterpreting biology as malice?
But Ihatedthat thought, hated the understanding it demanded, hated the way it threatened to rewrite the narrative I’d built just to survive. I didn’t want that answer. I didn’t want to give her the benefit of the doubt, or pick apart her motives the way I’d done my entire life, searching for one shred of softness, waiting for the magical moment she’d wake up and decide to be my mother.
And besides, what were the odds that she’d breezed through postpartum with my four older brothers, overflowing with the kind of love I spent watching from the periphery, but the sadness only decided to bloom when it wasmyturn? What were the chances that the darkness spared everyone else and saved its full force for the moment she heldme?
This proposal was supposed to be about me. This initiative, this gala was supposed to bemywork,myvision,mybeginning, and yet here she was anyway—her shadow creeping in, contaminating my space, my accomplishments, my world. Everything I did boiled down to her. Every triumph dragged her in like debris caught in a current.
Would I ever stop? Would I ever break free? Or was I doomed to orbit the gravitational pull of a woman who’d never once turned to look back at me?
My thoughts swung wildly, back and forth, like a pendulum I couldn’t still. One second I was furious—indignant, righteous,certain I deserved more than she’d ever given me. The next, I was a small child again, folded inward, wondering if freedom was even something I knew how to hold. If I’d recognize it without the pain attached.
Was healing supposed to feel this restless? This unsteady? Did moving on mean forgetting her entirely, or just learning how to breathe without checking the oxygen for her approval first?
Somewhere between anger and longing, between defiance and grief, it occurred to me that maybe the real question wasn’t whether she’d ever loosen her hold on me, but whether I’d finally stop tightening it myself.
A feral, helpless sound clawed its way out of me as I seized the stack of printed drafts and flung them across the room. Pages fluttered like startled birds, their edges catching the lamplight before drifting down in uneven, defeated spirals, landing in scattered heaps. I swept another pile off the coffee table—charts, cue cards, sticky notes scribbled with ideas I'd once believed were brilliant but now suddenly felt stupid, naïve,impossible—and they rained around me in a blizzard.
A hiss cut through the chaos. Steve, my personal four-legged tormentor, crouched on the arm of the sofa, tail puffed, ears flat. Her green eyes were pure disdain.
“Don’t be dramatic,” I muttered.
She made a low, menacing growl and, with a precision that would have made a ninja proud, sank her claws into one of the charts and lacerated it.
“Um, hello?” I snapped, gathering the ruined pieces. But before I could evict her from the apartment, something strange happened—a spark of rebellion, a flicker of solidarity with my tiny furry nemesis. I grabbed a sheet of my own and tore it straight down the middle. And then another. And another. Rip after rip, as if shredding paper could shred the thoughts too loud to contain, the anguish too old to soothe.
And still the cursor blinked. Counting. Waiting. Pausing on a blank page that felt more honest than anything I’d written so far.
I pushed back from the table and stood, my spine crackling like an old record. My body felt like one never-ending knot of caffeine and tension—a living cautionary tale about sitting too long in ambition. I stretched until my shoulders popped, then wandered a slow loop around the loft, trying to shake loose the pain of existing.
My headphones sat abandoned on the counter. I slipped them on, hit play, and let the music rush in—something bright, ridiculous, too alive for three in the morning.
The starting beats pulled at me gently. My mismatched socks—one pink fuzzy thing clinging to my right foot, the other a green ankle sock flecked with tiny emoji faces—slid over the cool floor, sluggish at first, just swaying, remembering what lightness felt like. Then came a turn, a spin, a laugh when I nearly tripped over a stack of printouts that had once been neatly labeled “important.”
For a few precious minutes, I let everything else fall away—the unwritten proposal, the unreasonable expectations, my mother’s voice blaring in the back of my mind like a curse I hadn’t finished breaking. I moved like I could shake her loose, like I could dance her out of my bloodstream. Every twist was a quiet exorcism of her, of the need to prove, to earn, to become.
Halfway through a very enthusiastic hip wiggle, a shift in the air made me glance up. Khalifa stood there, hair sleep-mussed, glasses slipping down his nose, wearing the expression of a man who’d stumbled into an alternate universe where his wife had lost her mind.
I froze, mid-step, one earbud dangling. “How long have you been standing there?”
“Long enough to question every decision that led me to this moment.” His gaze flew around the loft. “What did you do to my living room?”
“Ourliving room,” I corrected, tugging the other headphone out. “And it looks better now than it ever did when you had it set up like a furniture catalog for sad professors.”
He opened his mouth—probably to defend his tragic aesthetic choices—but something about the way his glasses were sliding askew on his face derailed me. Without thinking, I stepped closer and nudged them back into place with a timid fingertip.
His breath hitched. A disarming warmth unspooled through me—unexpected and way too much.
I jerked back like I’d touched a hot stove. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you up.”
One eyebrow arched. “Really? Because you were singing.”
“I was?”
“Yes,” he said solemnly. “Terribly off-key, I might add.”
I narrowed my eyes and stuck my tongue out at him, maturely and with great dignity.
He surveyed the mess with the weary caution of someone approaching a wild animal. “What is all this?”
