Recently, I’ve been reading High Fidelity by Nick Hornby. It’s a book that follows this record-store owner through his dating history and, ultimately, the bitter end of each relationship. I’m not going to lie; there are a lot of parts of this novel that make me want to hurl it out the nearest window, but one particular scene gave me an idea of how to talk to you. After his most recent breakup, the main character, Rob, reorganized his record collection in chronological order of when he acquired each album. For Rob, it was about self-intimacy, knowing that only he would be able to decipher the precise arrangement of his music. For me, it is about undoing childhood for you so that you might forgive me.

You once asked me why our mother no longer speaks to me, and honestly, I had no idea how to explain that endless bruise. Words feel like useless fuel when attempting to cross time and space in such an emotional rocketship.

That is the rub of why we find ourselves here—or why I am here, hoping you will soon come around. Finally, I may attempt to answer the question you asked me two years ago through a medium I like to believe I have mastered: the art of the mixtape.

Track 1: “Only If For A Night” – Florence + The Machine

“I threw my arms around her legs

Came to weeping (came to weeping)”

If there’s one thing I know about her, it’s that she is an ocean.

Growing up, our mother would take me to Cannon Beach, and when you, Parker, and Pierson were born, her chosen destination soon became Manzanita. She hated camping, hiking, and the outdoors, but when she visited the ocean, they greeted each other like old friends.

I still can’t decipher the details of this friendship; it could have been the salt in the air or the texture of the wet sand on her bare feet that felt like the closest instance she ever had to a true embrace. The only thing that was clear to me from a young age, and remains stunningly true, is that she had more love for this cavernous body of water than she ever had for her husband (your father, and years before that, my father), her own mother, her few friends, or for us—her children.

I am her only daughter, and I wanted her so badly.

This is not to say that you didn’t crave something impossible from her, too. It is simply that you still know her, and I must find her through the ocean.  

Track 2: “She Sends Kisses” – The Wrens

 “Five rows of photos when you wrote

Of posed you, dressed blue, a backyard boat” 

You wouldn’t believe the luck I have.

I was searching for apartments the other day and hovered my mouse over one in my price range, and something seemed familiar, I’ll admit.

When I opened up the ad, I realized, suspicions confirmed, that it was the studio above your house with mom. Everything about it was exactly what I was looking for, except the one thing. So, for a brief skeleton moment, I fumbled with the thought of applying, accepting, and moving in.

It’s not illegal anymore, so she couldn’t even stop me.

After all these years, I’m pretty sure her morning routine would still align with mine because some lessons taught are never forgotten.

I’ll close my eyes right now; you could, too, and don’t think of it as something sad. Only when we pretend do we get to have the mother we need. If it hasn’t already, this will become a coping mechanism. 

So, imagine: I’ll have moved upstairs to her open arms, and a couple months later, it would be one of those January mornings that bites chills into your skin, but the skies would be clear. (This is important to the game of pretend—clear skies, always.)

I would wake up slowly, savoring the early hours like I used to, and mom would be awake below me. Like a cat, I would hear her shuffling in solitude below, and I would sip my coffee, stalking her footsteps with my own. By eight o’clock, she would exit your house in her leggings and that jacket I know she’s had since before you were born. She would not return for another twenty minutes. There would be a styrofoam fast food cup in her soft but chewed-upon hands. 

Like clockwork, we would both sit on our balconies as the bright morning overturned into the next hour. While I’d be on my second cup, she would drink her Coke from the frightening McDonald’s down the street.

It used to be coffee. I don’t know if you remember. She would top it off with hazelnut creamer, the one in the cone-shaped yellow bottle. I still see it when I go grocery shopping. When we talked in the park two years ago, she told me there was too much fat in the creamer and too much caffeine in the coffee, so she switched to soda.

I like to think that our mother would be reading a real paperback book, but you told me she reads on her phone now. To be realistic with this scenario, I imagine her reading something like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo on her phone and smoking her morning Marlboro, most likely. Also, to keep things truthful, I’ll admit to you that I would be smoking a cigarette as well.

Both of us would have large containers of caffeine, and it would be because of this that we would sit together on our balconies for quite a while. She would finish a chapter of her novel and notice it’s getting a bit chilly, so she would pack up her smokes and step to the edge of the porch to give me a little wave before stepping inside, leaving me alone in the cold.

Track 3: “Fare Thee Well, Miss Carousel” – Townes Van Zandt

“When the battle’s been fought, and they’ve all been taught

That the trick is just not being caught

Will you give ’em hell, Miss Carousel

When they’re begging you to hide them?” 

 My long-deepened opinions on country music changed in June of 2020 when my dad and I drove to the Painted Hills in central Oregon for a camping trip.

The last time you saw my father was when you were five or so, and he came to pick me up for his scheduled week. There’s a photo of Parker, you, and me sitting in the front entrance on that day. My dad had just given you a guitar, and though it was as tall as you, your tiny hands held it firmly in your lap. Parker and I smiled stiffly on either side of you. He was wearing a bucket hat and those little round bug glasses we used to have to strap to his head.

It’s about four hours to the hills, and right after we’d passed the first hour, we turned onto I-84 towards The Dalles. This section of the highway is lonely; the road is simply a sharp cut into the rock towering at either side. Alone in every direction, the sun sat steeply overhead, and the music we were listening to suddenly stopped. I checked my phone, no service. We tried the radio, but static filled our ears, so we turned that off, too.

My father is a musician and raised me to be a cross-genre music nut, just like him. A long drive without song was an absolute last resort. After the radio, we checked our phones for anything downloaded. Mine came up nil, but my dad’s face broke into a soft grin.

 “I have one album.”

“What is it?” 

Assuming it was one of Morrisey’s solo works, I mentally prepared for the long road ahead.

“I think you’ll like it.”

This was the first time I had heard of Townes Van Zandt. Maybe it was the rustic setting or that I was an eighteen-year-old fresh into falling in love for the first time, but I melted.

Now I understand why my virgin ears hugged his songs so tight: he wrote lyrics that made sense. He was a shattered addict and poured possibly everything he had into his music. He wouldn’t work with Bob Dylan because of Dylan’s “extreme celebrity,” he only played dingy venues, and was kind of an asshole until he eventually died of an overdose.

Townes Van Zandt reminded me of our mother.

Written between the lyrical lines of these songs was our mother’s history. On this drive, my father and I’s last trip together before I moved out, he told me about our mother’s childhood.

As the lonesome hills on either side of the car caressed the slowly sinking sun, I learned about mom at fifteen, her dad dying of AIDS, a stepdad coming into her room every night, and her own mother tossing her away like used paper.

When my parents met, my dad was twenty-two, and mom was seventeen. Neither was loved; mom was falling, and my dad thought he could catch her. A year later, they were married on the Marine Corps Military base in Hawai’i so that mom could live with her freshly recruited Marine husband. They spent ten years together, and I believe they were truly in love. It was after a few years of marriage that our mother got back into hanging with an old group of friends—friends, I suppose, that liked her better when she was high.

Dad and I drove the whole day, planning on staying in the painted hills; we crept further east, searching for the perfect camping spot until the light had completely dissolved. Deciding that pitching a tent in the dark would be too challenging, we pressed play on Townes Van Zandt’s self-titled for the fifth time and headed home.

Track 4: “Mythological Beauty” – Big Thief

“There is a child inside you who is trying 

To raise the child in me

… You’re all caught up inside

But you know the way”
The first time our mom overdosed, she was married to my dad. They lived in the studio attached to my grandma Nancy’s house in Danville, California. My dad had just finished four years of military service. Surrounded by palm trees and cul-de-sacs, they were in their mid-twenties, broke, and complete disasters. Mom liked to party—she always had. She was hooked at fifteen after our grandpa Mike died. I’m sure it started off smaller than opioids, but that’s what got her eventually. Pushed her a bit over the edge, I suppose.

Dad said he found her in the bathroom and that she had locked herself in there on purpose. In a long line of nail biters, our mother had separated herself from the rest of the world to carry on a tradition. But she failed to do so, just as I did a year ago and you last Spring. Someone was always too close to the other side of the door, listening, matching breath to breath. My dad had to drag her to the car, speeding to the hospital, tailed by cop sirens attempting to slow him down. He told me that the whole way, he kept one hand on the wheel and one hand on our mother, shaking, screaming every time she closed her eyes.

She made it that night, but mom went on to overdose another five times before being sent to treatment in Arizona, where she called my father on the phone halfway through her six months:

“Eric, I want to come home.”

“Why?”

“Let’s have a baby.”

 Track 5: “Float On” – Modest Mouse

“I ran my mouth off a bit too much, oh, what did I say?

Well, you just laughed it off, it was all okay

… Alright, already, we’ll all float on

No, don’t you worry, we’ll all float on (alright)” 

To escape everyone and everything, we drove to the beach. We wanted to go to Manzanita but were afraid she would find us there and take away the ocean forever. I had just turned nineteen and still drove that janky ’95 Toyota, which rattled vigorously like a toddler pulling a wheelbarrow. I hadn’t seen you in a bit; it wouldn’t be safe if I knew where you were. You were tired and anxious, dark circles cupping your eyes. 

I wish it could’ve been different, the whole situation—one day burning into the next, burning everything down. There was no way it could’ve been easier, I promise; I’ve played it out so many times that I must’ve lost countless hours of sleep staring at the cracks in the plaster of my ceiling. What I know for sure is that when you said you needed to get out, I knew. Guilt already sat sour in my gut for leaving you eight years prior. People will say there was another way, that I should’ve left things to the social workers and police, but where did that get us? The last resort, the only resort, was to be your sister. Maybe I was too intense, should’ve trusted protective services, or that one lawyer who told me to give it up after I gave him all the money we had. But if intensity keeps you safer than waiting, I will take the high road every single time, and this is something you already know. 

That day driving to the ocean, I shuffled my songs, and I kid you not, this fucking song came on.

Modest Mouse: the epitome of an early 2000s Portland childhood. A world trademarked by puddles, chosen secrets shared in a backyard tent in midsummer, wet leaves, and soggy hair. The childhood that had tapped us on our shoulders, then ran away giggling, constantly alluding us with its game.

You rolled your eyes, and I grinned out at the road. I remember starting to cry for the first time in front of you. I remember I didn’t want you to have to hold me because I was there to hold you. Our going to the beach was my way of holding you without arms. I remember you telling me it was going to be okay. You. After everything.

When we were children, I would let you use the rug in my room as a roadmap for your toy cars. I never wanted anyone else in that space, but I even turned on the radio while you played.

And I suppose that’s why it will never make sense: because I’m raising you, and you’re raising me, and we’re this mess of kids trying to raise our mother forever.

Highway twenty-six slid out from under my tires as we rounded the bend in the road; the curtain of trees peeled away, introducing us to the ocean. We both shouted “Hi,” at the view, greeting an old friend.

Track 6: “Risk” – Deftones

“But I think I can try

I will save your life

I will save your life” 

We came from her, her womb a studio of sorts, and she chose to present us as final works from the moment we came out screaming, covered in her jelly.

I’ve hung a map of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in almost every room since I got it on my trip to New York when I was sixteen. About ten sectioned-off wings are illustrated on this map, each dedicated to a different genre of art: Egyptian Art, Greek and Roman Art, Modern and Contemporary Art, European Sculpture, etc.

As agonized babies, she divided us into separate wings, and each one had its architectural significance on her tour of social propriety. These were not rotating exhibitions; there was no room for transformation or social commentary; like each regional wing, she made sure we stayed consistently curated and placed to her liking.

We were born to do her a favor, the four of us. You, with your straight blonde hair, I swear, you were already taller than everyone the minute you were born. Quiet at first, but I remember you drew these comics that shouted so loudly from their pages: electrocution, monsters, prisoners, suicide.

Parker was much smaller, born only a year after you. He was rushed to the emergency room in her arms when his heart stopped moments after birth. Not the first to speak but the first to move, he stayed like ink on a page, words our mother regrets writing but needed desperately to hear. 

Pierson was born when I was ten, so naturally, he became mine. I spent countless afternoons feeding him saltines from a package as he babbled on and on in a language only infants can articulate. 

It was her job, as any mother’s, to curate our faults and technicalities to assimilate into the big, bad world. Every creation must be a masterpiece for our mother, so she chiseled us into sculptures that could only be recognized by others as her work. She perched us on pedestals when we wore the right clothes or joined a sport she liked, opening the doors and allowing everyone to gaze at her remarkable collection. After all, it was her work, her creation, and her knowledge that had sculpted such a worthy thing into reality.

But when we went against her unwritten rules, whispered words, or desperate peddling for a compliment, she pushed us off her workbench and gladly watched us shatter at her feet. 

We needed her to be rebuilt. We needed her, and that was all you craved. 

As our mother’s children, we were her coat, her paved road, her name over and over and over again. We protected her from being seen as lonely and depraved. We laid down across every estuary so her feet would not get wet.

She believed every bridge she craved to cross could only be built pound by pound with flesh. The worst part of this lesson I had to learn as her child, especially her eldest, was that each pound of my own was part of her unruly design. 

From the moment I existed beyond an infant, the word “daughter” only filled a specific place in a sentence for her, as if it could easily be replaced with “enemy” at any given moment. Based on everything that has unfolded in her dictionary, I am now thoroughly convinced that “daughter” is a synonym for “enemy.”

I think it may be easier for her to love you and our little brothers as her children. My femininity presented a threat. I cannot be in your life now because I have always been, and always will be, our mother’s daughter, my mother’s enemy.

Track 7: “Once in a Lifetime” – Talking Heads

“There is water at the bottom of the ocean

Under the water, carry the water

… Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down”

You asked me why our mother and I no longer speak.

I used to hate every woman because she told me in front of a mirror that my mismatched socks wouldn’t cut it. I heard repeated rumors for years after I left and after she was gone. Rumors that mom had whispered at me from a young age. They were barely whimpers in the dark, yet I still clung onto them, like bible verses tucked away in drawers and pockets. She is why people in my life worry about me, and their fear of me slipping is almost justified. 

I still hate almost every woman. I hate their noses and perfect lips, the way freckles fall like constellations across their faces. I have cried myself to sleep, believing that those freckles are what make me replaceable. I hate how other women are so pricelessly beautiful, how they take care of each other, of me. I grew up thinking that women were for loathing. It is something of mom’s I have had a much harder time letting go, a precious gift she gave me: jealousy. It was an emotion that she understood as a means to an end. The only way she could love herself was because she was the curator. She had the power to decide who was worth being seen in a world full of priceless objects. 

Do you want to know why everyone in our family pretends not to know me?

I was her eldest, her only daughter, her only threat. Mom had existed her whole life, wound by wound, but suddenly, when I was born, she was poised with a fork in her beautifully paved road.

Looking at me in her arms, what is my fault, and what will be hers?

It’s true, I was carried carefully for the first few years of my life, but you must understand the threat a walking, talking girl has on our mother’s reputation.

It must’ve been when I was eight years old that she taught me to shave. A forceful confusion encircled my childhood about whether she should raise or create me. After all, I was an extension of her work, and when I began acting like a boy, she couldn’t let that be her own fault. So, she taught me to scrape the short, invisible hairs off my legs and underarms, a simple solution. It was lipgloss for holidays, pink frosting on my cake, and ballet. Not too much of any of these things, though; I couldn’t be prettier than her. That, too, would disrupt her creative process. 

We used to spend hours in the bathroom together. It must’ve been before Pierson was born and after you and Parker were sent to bed. I’d perch on the edge of the clawfoot tub while she hung over the sink, facing the mirror, curling iron in hand. 

There was a particular evening when she was going out with my stepfather—your father, I suppose. She said she wouldn’t be home until late. It was already dark outside, so it must’ve been fall or winter, and she had straightened, curled, and crimped her hair, but something wasn’t right. She took a break, setting the iron on the shelf by the sink, picking up her eye shadows, and lining her dark brown eyes with a deep, sparkly black powder. Our mother gave you her eyes, no doubt. Mine are blue, like my dad’s, a color she had always wanted. I sat, picking at a scab on my knee, hoping she wouldn’t notice how dark its scar was becoming. She leaned in, carefully aligning herself in the mirror until both eyes were rimmed.

“Grace.”

She had turned to me. I jumped a little, my nails pulling at my blood-crusted skin.

“Yes?”

She ignored my crimes.

“What do you think?”

I was startled but not shocked that she had asked for my opinion; I was only ten, and I would tell her what she wanted to hear.

“About your eyes?”

“No, the whole thing, my hair too.”

 I hated it.

Preston—our mom is so beautiful. I used to love to watch her make coffee in the morning. Remember her long blonde hair? It fell over her pale face, dark hazel eyes, and long neck. Sometimes, a hidden dimple would appear on her cheek when she smiled with her teeth. We both have the same indent whenever we laugh. It’s a bit sad.

But the makeup she had put on concealed the bright specks in her eyes, and she had applied so much foundation, a shade too dark, that her face no longer matched the rest of her skin.

“I don’t think the… eyes work with the rest of it.”

 I tensed up. I was always trying to save her.

 In one swift motion, she tossed her mascara into the sink, turned to me, and pushed against my chest hard. I was precariously balanced and toppled backward into the empty tub, smacking my head on its opposite wall. I felt dizzy; I couldn’t understand what she was saying. Something about my attitude, how I was a brat, or maybe it was bitch, I don’t remember. I don’t remember her ever asking for my opinion again, even when I apologized over and over.

I think about each woman I’ve hated, how they posed an invisible threat, like a secret knife hidden in their skirts, ready to slit my throat while they laughed. Each one was so gentle, so kind, and I was so angry that I couldn’t be like them. My gentleness was too blasé; my kindness had an edge. Every day, I must fight off her critique of people I love dearly, hot words and impulses plastered against my tongue since I was a toddler. These women, mostly feminine, hold no weapons, I have learned. But I can feel my own knife against my leg, a knife that our mother gave me, has given each of us, and that we’ve learned to use by watching her.

It has been two years since she and I last spoke and ten since I even tried pretending I was part of your family. But here I am, Preston, at a junction similar to the one she was presented with at my birth:

 What is her fault, and what is mine?

 I realized not long ago that if she has no one, there is nothing for her to live for. She wouldn’t know herself in a mirror, she couldn’t give me the definition of mother, and I wore matching socks all my life because I didn’t look close enough at her reflection to notice that I am the reason she exists. She is just a woman, and I am curating this narrative so that all her children can be their own museum.   

“Under the water, carry the water

Letting the days go by”