love, read, write

My mother was a rather private person. This was not apparent to me as a child; I presumed that all mothers were like mine – reserved, secretive, sparing in her words. She was a ghost of a woman, floating in and out of my life, leaving only traces of her cedarwood perfume and the echoes of her heels clicking down the hallway of our apartment complex. 

Our conversations were always just short of something real. Occasionally, during dinner, she might ask, "how was your day?" and I would reply, "good," and after a pause she'd nod, "good, good." And we would spend the rest of the meal in silence. I would sit at the edge of my seat, a flower leaning in closer to the sun.

I remember the suppressed glee I felt when my mother one day commented on my outfit upon returning home from school, "your shoes are worn. We'll go to the mall tomorrow." We spent the next day trying on new sneakers. I sat on one of the benches in the shoe store as she fit different shoes on my swinging feet. "Do you want something with more color?" she asked. I nodded, then immediately regretted myself when I saw a fleeting look of frustration flash by her face before she settled into her mild smile, "Sure, let me go look for another pair."

When I was around six, I discovered a box hidden in my mother's office. Her office was the biggest subject of my jealousy; it was the cave into which she disappeared every evening. It was a world unto itself, something that I was not afforded access to. "I need my own room," she had told me when I'd asked, "just like you need yours." She offered no additional explanation, as if it was only normal that her door had a lock while mine did not.

My discovery was facilitated by a particular late-night espionage, in which I had pretended to be asleep when my mother returned from work. When I heard her close my bedroom door after walking in to observe me for several minutes (something she did every day, standing above me as if she was contemplating something serious, before leaving me – she never gave me a kiss or a hug), I counted sixty seconds before tip-toeing towards my door. I cracked it open and watched my mother move in her solitude under the dim lamplight.

She walked towards the houseplant next to the kitchen window. She raised the pot and lifted a key off of the saucer underneath. I instantly understood what would happen next. She walked to the office door, unlocked it, and disappeared into her room.

The next day I feigned illness; my mother, only partially interested, distractedly allowed me to stay home from school. She left me with a couple sandwiches and went to work. The moment she closed the door behind her, I jumped up off the bed and went straight to the flower pot. 

Unsurprisingly, the room was a complete mess. There were shelves lining the walls and towers of books clustered randomly about the floor. At the other side of the room there was a desk which expertly hid her keyboard and mouse under a torrent of half-opened envelopes, stacks of loose papers, and uncapped pens.

And then, behind the desk, was a closet. It was closed shut. Immediately I found myself drawn to it as if by some inexplicable pull. This was where I discovered the box. 

It was sitting at the very back, clearly not meant to be touched or seen. I might have missed it if I'd only given it a passing glance; it was wrapped in a blanket as if to blend in with the quilts atop it. I threw the quilts to the side and dragged the heavy thing out into the center of the room, coughing from the little clouds of dust I stirred up in its wake.

Inside was a stack of folders. There were maybe twenty in there. Each was labeled with a year in decisive and thick sharpie. This was a chilling discovery – it was uncharacteristic of my mother to have organized something so neatly. Our apartment, of which the office seemed to be no exception, was a hurricane of clothes and crumpled receipts and unwashed mugs that denied any capability for tidiness. I thought I was discovering her alter ego. I opened each folder carefully, feeling its weight in my tiny lap as I leafed through the pages, examining my mother's sprawling handwriting. Forms, signatures, journal entries of some sort. I could not bother to read all of it, but I remember reading one word, sounding out each letter – "NON-DISCLOSURE" – which stuck with me because it sounded very important and a little bit scary. Every once in a while I would come across a picture paper-clipped to a page. Sometimes it would be of just my mother, full of youth and wavy hair and smiling teeth, exuding an energy that felt foreign; others were group photos of adults I could not recognize, arms slung around each other with an intimacy that I did not like; in the later folders, I found pictures of myself that I had never seen, and something about these in particular made me feel sad – they had a distance about them, devoid of the familiarity captured in her earlier years. My mind was struggling to understand the purpose of these folders. The musty air caught in my throat, and I felt the guilt of everything I was doing weigh down onto my lungs, as if pushing me towards the door out into the living room where the air would be crisp and fresh again. I remember abruptly standing up. In a rushed daze I put the folders into the box and dragged it back into the corner of the closet, surely not in the same neatly disguised condition that I had found it. The rest of the day I sat still on the couch, fiddling with my slinky toy until my mother came home. I waited for her reprimand. 

It never came. If my mother had noticed, she never mentioned it to me, nor I to her, and the memory slowly faded away for most of my childhood and adult years.

<< this was originally part of a larger fiction draft i am working on, but i decided to scrap and completely redo, which left this version of the draft in limbo, which i felt sad about,, so here it is, a snippet of the thing which will never otherwise see the light of day ., >>