What was the word that she'd wanted to speak? She’s thinking thinking waiting for it to come back, but it does not, and now it won’t ever.

Do you know the feeling? Of when you are so so tired, you have not slept in days, and you’re sitting trying to stay with them all around you but your eyes keep shutting closed and then opening again with a jerk of your body. But when they are closed you still hear all the things around you but all the things morph and shift and become something else in your head, in the awake dreams of your awake asleep state.

Do you know the feeling? She keeps nodding her head, lolling back and forth, and she’s scared to go home and scared to stay here because what if she falls asleep and something terrible happens.

Do you know the feeling? Something terrible is about to happen. You know it. You feel it in the little goosebumps of your skin, the ones that haven’t risen yet but will. There is a shadow emerging from the closet. Your muscles are tense, hurting. Someone is knocking on the door but they do not come in. What is this. Something is inside you all around you black and oozing from your nose mouth eyes ears.

Do you know the feeling?

Fucking tell me if you do. Do you know it? Have you lived? Tell me how to survive it.

I’m not going to survive it.

Sayuri knew her mother hated her. She’d known it for so long she’d forgotten if it ever had been anything different. It was something she’d learned to keep deep in her gut, a weight she carried so long it became a part of her own. Sayuri thought that if she ever unknew that weight it would make like she weighed less than she should, like her feet floated above the earth, grazing it occasionally but never grounded.

It wasn’t the sort of knowing that came from seeing it. Sayuri’s skin was clear, pale, chilled to the touch most always. Her friend Morgan once showed her the sort of bruises that proved something. They came in different colors. She had a dark purple one that covered most of her left upper thigh, and small green ones that riddled the skin of her ears when she pulled her dark hair back. She sometimes had the marks of fingers faded yellow on her forearms, or a rainbow of color on her back. She had a ring of reddish purple around her neck for two weeks after she tried to hang herself.

Sayuri touched them gently when Morgan first showed them to her, and they plotted together how to rid the world of Morgan’s mother, but they had both just turned six years old, and after some failed attempts that only just resulted in more bruises for Morgan, decided they’d perhaps wait a few more years.

In the eighth grade, a teacher found out about the abuse and reported it, leaving out the part where he had discovered it trying to take her shirt off. Sayuri got him fired by making him try the same with her.

Sayuri knew her mother hated her like she knew the color of her eyes, tawny, and the angles at which a camera captured her face best. Like she knew the times table and the names of all her teachers grades one through ten. She knew it like she knew Morgan liked the flavor orange sherbet best, like she knew the way her father’s face looked each day he came home from work, and like she knew the red splotches her sister’s face took when she cried. Sayuri knew it like she knew her hands, the space between the letters in her handwriting, the sound of her mother’s choked voice.

She didn’t think her mother knew that she hated her daughter.

It was too subtle to realize. Sometimes Sayuri wondered how she was so certain, but she never doubted it. It was in her mother’s eyes when she looked at her, that layer of something in them, like she couldn’t see her, and it was in the slight down turn of her lips. It was in her dull voice and in her absence from anything that ever meant anything to Sayuri. She did not speak to her daughter but to ask what the time was, what she wanted for dinner, and when she was coming home.

She couldn’t say she minded. Sayuri hadn’t really ever known her mother’s love to miss it. It was not a hole that needed filling, or an absence, because it had never existed in the first place. She did not blame her mother. She knew that her mother was broken in a way that couldn’t be fixed. She slept too much and ate in only small portions. She had no friends and did not leave the house. Sayuri had found her once sprawled across the floor of the bathroom, laying in her own vomit, wearing nothing but underwear. She had called for an ambulance and then called her dad at work, and had shut the bathroom door so her little sister wouldn’t see before cradling her mother’s head, turning her neck, pale and breakable looking, so she would not choke on her vomit. Sayuri hadn’t cried. When she recalled it later, she couldn’t quiet remember feeling anything at all.

Sayuri had once snuck into her mother’s bathroom as she slept. She wanted to try the pills that all the other kids were taking at school, but didn’t have the money. She’d rummaged through her mother’s instead, and recognized the name of one, because it was the same as what Morgan took after they’d hauled her mother away, but there were four more labels on four more orange hand sized bottles that she’d never heard of before.

Sayuri knew the way her mother liked her tea. Black, cream, no sugar. She knew her mother ate three bowls of oatmeal a day, one in the morning and two before bed, and knew she would take only the pure sort of brown sugar with it, not the molasses kind. She knew which words to avoid and when not to speak and what steps to skip on the creaky stairs of their falling apart home.

But it was never quite enough.

This too, she learned to know.

“I hate myself,” she’d said one day. It wasn’t in a flurry of anger. She said it more like an afterthought, quiet enough that it was only for her, a sort of realization, and after speaking the words did not recall whether she meant to say them aloud or not. She knew it was not a lie, but Sayuri could not find it in herself to feel anything but apathetic towards the statement. She wondered if everyone hated themselves.

“Shut up!” Her mother had screamed. It shocked her from her daze, shoulders jumping. She looked up to her mother and tried to understand what she’d done wrong. “You don’t know the meaning of that. You don’t get to hate yourself.”

She’d said that with fury in her voice, looked at her daughter like she was the ugliest creature she’d ever seen, like she was ashamed. Sayuri understood then she didn’t have a right to hate herself. Only the tragedies did, and she was privileged. She had a warm house, warm food, a few friends and an adequate education. Her father provided for her, and her sister was healthy.

Her mother hated her, but that was inconsequential to all else she’d been given.

“You’re all worthless, worthless,” she’d screamed. Sayuri opened her bedroom door to listen. She didn’t know the way her fists shook, or the burn in her eyes. She’d seen Morgan cry before, and thought this might be what it felt like, but her cheeks stayed dry. She waited until her mother’s voice was replaced instead with wracking sobs, and then closed the door to sleep.

That was two nights ago.

It’s a Thursday night, and there isn’t school tomorrow. Morgan is painting Sayuri’s nails a shade of blue. It’s too dark of a color for Sayuri, but she doesn’t bother to say anything. She liked the tickle of Morgan’s hands on her skin, and the silence that often took the room when she focused so intently on a task.

“Sayuri,” Morgan interrupts it. Sayuri doesn’t respond with more than a small sound of acknowledgment. “Why don’t you care?”

“About what?”

“Everything.” Morgan moves on to the next hand. Sayuri watches her work, thinking. She tries to figure out why Morgan’s thought about this enough to ask, since Morgan never asked a question before thinking long and hard in search of an answer herself. Morgan’s mother never liked questions.

Sayuri doesn’t understand the question.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, you don’t care. I’ve never seen you interested in anything beyond the passing glance. You don’t smile unless smiled to, or speak unless spoken to. I asked people at school what they thought of you, and they said you’re the ‘girl who never looks anyone in the eyes.’ One kid said you never laugh. Emily, from Algebra II? She said she’s scared you’re plotting a murder all the time.”

“Maybe hers now.” Morgan doesn’t laugh. That’s how she knows she’s being serious.

“Do you remember that time you broke your arm in gym?”

Sayuri nods. It’s vague, but she recalls one too many bodies shoving her this way and that, falling at an unfortunate angle and her entire weight pressing enough to break the bone. She thinks she heard it more than she felt it, the crack. The sound echoed in her ears all the way to the hospital and then that night when she tried to sleep.

“Yeah.”

“Everyone was freaking out. I couldn’t stop crying, and you just sat there looking at it, that stupid fucking arm, with this blank look on your face. I swear to god Sayuri, that look scared me more than the arm when I saw it. You didn’t cry, or scream. You didn’t do anything.”

“You slapped me.”

“It was like you weren’t there. And I didn’t want people seeing you like that. They would have made you get help. I should have just left it.”

“You’re wrong.”

“Not about this.”

“No, I mean. You slapped me, and I came back, right?” Sayuri waits, watching Morgan’s face. She feels tired, and wants her to get it without saying it.

“Right,” is all she says. She doesn’t get it.

“So then, I care about you.”

Morgan finishes the last finger without looking up and recaps the bottle. When she finally does, Sayuri recognizes the glaze of her eyes that means she’s about to cry.

“It’s not enough,” she says. Her voice is both angry and sad. It makes Sayuri’s chest burn.

“Why can’t it be?”

“It’s just not.”

Sayuri doesn’t know how to respond, so she doesn’t. She blows on her hands to help them dry, then plops down on her back to the mattress, leaving space for Morgan beside her. 

Once the paint dries, she lets Morgan play with her fingers in silence, turning and twisting them this way and that, watching the sky turn from outside her open window.

Sayuri tries to recall a time she cared. She wants something to tell Morgan that will ease her worrying, since it’s clearly taken up a lot of her mind. But all she can come up with is Morgan herself, and sometimes her little sister. She knows it won’t be enough, and doesn’t fall asleep that night after Morgan leaves.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Sayuri watches the clock hanging on the wall. It is already ten o clock at night, but her father won’t be home for another three hours. She allows scalding water to run over her hands, uncaring of its burn, before shutting it off and turning to her mother, who has just finished putting in the last dish in the washer.

“Why do you hate me?” Sayuri asks.

“What?”

“Why do you hate me? I want to know.” For the first time in her life, Sayuri says it with an anger in her voice. It brings something out from her mother of the same sort, and she turns to her daughter with fire in her eyes, the first time she’s ever looked at her with anything more than apathy.

“I don’t.”

“You don’t have to lie,” Sayuri says, and means it. “You don’t know it, I know that. But I’m telling you now it’s the truth, so can you figure it out for me? I need to know.”

“I don’t hate you,” her mom says again, firm. Then, “I just… I don’t care.”

Somehow that hurts more, but Sayuri revels the ache in her chest and the knot in her throat. Her eyes burn, her fists shake, and her voice trembles when she speaks again.

“Why?”

Her mother looks away, mouth in a firm line and hair falling to mask the expression she takes. Sayuri imagines it must be a bored one, dull, uncaring. She doesn’t care.

“You just… you have so little regard for your own life. I thought when I had you, you’d grow into the woman that I never got the chance to be. You have everything I didn’t have, a home when I lived in a hole, a family when all I got was a father that only loved me for my body. But then you just went to be…” her mother makes a vague gesture, “…this thing. I don’t know you. I don’t recognize you.

Sayuri knew all of this already. The blank spaces that made up her mother’s past had been filled up in recent years, when she’d discovered the many medications, when she’d realized her father never really touched her mother like other couples did, when she’d been in the car when her father dropped her mother off at an ambiguous looking building, only to figure out later it was a psychologist’s office. Her mother’s past was written in the blankness of her expression and the way she held herself, in her dull voice and in her brokenness. It wasn’t possible to hide brokenness. A child might not see it for what it was, but Sayuri knew it was something even young, and she’d know it now for what it was all along. Her mother was broken. It wasn’t Sayuri’s fault.

“That’s not fair.”

“What.”

“It’s not… how could I have known? You never told me you wanted me to be something more than just your daughter. I tried so hard to be. I loved you even though you don’t love me. I didn’t know you wanted more.”

“That’s…”

“You want me to be what you could’ve been, but I never had a chance. Now I’m just what you’ve become.”

“Don’t say that.”

“I’m empty. I’m empty, I’m…”

Her mother slaps her.

At first the shock does nothing but still her heart. And then the sting starts up, and Sayuri brings her hand up to run fingertips across her cheek. She feels it in every part of her body, and it hurts more than anything ever has, and she relishes it.

And then, Sayuri begins to cry.

The tears burn. They rush down too fast for her to wipe them away, and she can only just make out the shocked expression of her mother through her blurred vision.

She feels a sick twist to the corner of her mouth, and then she smiles and then she laughs, a bubbly thing, and then keeps on laughing, clutching her pained stomach, so hard she can’t tell the difference between the tears from pain and the tears from laughter. They are the same thing. She thinks it must be making up for lost time.

She gets it. She understands. Sayuri knows that if a car came rushing towards her she wouldn’t get out of the way. She knows that if someone pulled a gun in a dark alley way and pressed it against her stomach she would not scream for help. She knows that if she were to trip and fall down a steep mountain she would not scramble for a hold. She didn’t care for life. She breathed because it was easier than dying. But if death came her way Sayuri wouldn’t turn it away.

Then she thinks of Morgan. And she thinks about how her mother doesn’t care. And she stops laughing. Her mother looks at her then, and it is that look in her eyes that finally makes Sayuri want to breathe. It isn’t blank, unfeeling. It is seeing, and fear.

She thinks about a body shoving her hard out of the way of the car and to the pavement, and then thinks about moving out of the way herself. She thinks about an arm coming up to smack that gun away, and then she thinks about twisting the gun away herself.

And she thinks about a hand reaching towards her falling body to grasp ahold of her, to pull her back up. She thinks about wrapping her fingers around that anchor and holding tightly back, instead of waiting, limp, to fall one way or the other. Unwilling to let go until her feet hit the ground solid again, until she finds a way to know herself, until she knows how to be alive, how to breathe, how to because she wants to.