I dreamed that I jumped up on something tall and screamed at you as you laughed and walked away.

I dreamed I yelled at you, and you fled into your old gray duffel bag. I kicked the bag and you died. I ran to Dad, screaming my head off.

Last night I dreamed I was overwhelmed in a crowd. I crawled into your arms and they came around me and protected me from everything. You ask Dad for a place to sleep and he says no. I remember the now distant times of us all together. The golden years. The Childhood of my childhood. All that was good. The good it made in me. The gold that it is.

I wonder what you really thought of me at the time. Did you think I was weak and not destined for much? Did you smile and think I was the best of you? Was I your friend, your companion, or your burden? Was there a genuine laugh when you compared me to weak stock—claiming you would probably leave me to die if I had been born to your litter in the wild? Did you believe it when you told Keith I would be broken and messed up forever, or was that just what you saw for yourself?

I don’t think I can really ask you those things. I wonder if you can put down the hurt you’ve caused and ever be real with me—something I know we both struggle with.

I have dreamed so many times that I run into you, and every time, I want to solicit a reaction out of you.

Your lack of compassion is a black stain. Your lies and deceit ring loud and clear from the hollowing depths of my memory. While looks, colors, and objects fade, your remarkable influence over me, both beautiful and cruel, remains ever visible in my daily life. With a pocketful of golden joy, I stand at the foot of a mountain of grief. After seven years of your absolute absence, it still seems insurmountable. Sometimes.

For many of those years, I was everything that you said, and I became dislodged from reality as I soaked and spewed in my own self-loathing. I was weak, impossible, and destined for a life of darkness. I lost my true self to the shadow you nurtured in me.

Just a few years of living in that miserable squalor ate up almost everything golden inside of me and burned down almost everything good around me. I can only imagine the smoking, desolate wreckage you must see in your life when you allow yourself to feel it (on those rare, faraway moments, having lived that way for almost all the time I have been alive). It must be something like a tire fire started in the middle of a forest surrounded by the fogs of Silent Hill. When did you kill everything in your heart?

There are no longer snippets or fleeting moments in my memories of my childhood. I have reached the point where the story is complete, and I can read it like a book, start to finish. I can see the chapters at the beginning, and I have strong love/hate relationships with the characters, especially knowing the full impact they will have. They grew alongside me. Good guys became bad guys, and sometimes vice-versa. Impossible feats, or events that seemed to take everything out of me, became a page or two that could easily be skipped without missing out on the grand story. Characters I used to like, maybe think I needed, become distant, and I can now relate to the evil in the ones I always despised. I know that I, as the protagonist, was not always likable, and I would say often inflexible, and at certain times, it has caused a lot of frustration around me. 

And then there was my lone self: a wild and emotional wreck I don’t think anyone ever realized or understood. It is now clear to me what makes a child act that way, and how harmful it is to carry those thoughts, feelings, and behaviors into the next part of any story. Regardless of whether or not more could have been done for me at the time, the greatest threat to me was not you, but the inner conflict I carried within myself.

I think I know well enough, with a shared human experience, my many observations of mental illness, and the knowledge of the familial relationship, and am comfortable saying that I can understand how you were hurt, and how you have become what you have become. I see you for what I see you for—no longer a mysterious and complex woman. No longer a loving, sympathetic mother. No longer my friend. I see you for what you are. I see you as a person I could have easily become.

Sometimes I just want to start screaming, “YOU BITCH! You FUCKING LYING BITCHFACE BITCH!” That’s the young and angry self that requires the most soothing, but she gets the most laughs out of me. Unfortunately, that girl will never fucking forgive you.

You are akin to a living nightmare as you haunt my waking and sleeping moments with the gravitational force of your everlasting Vacuum. Once my friend, once my mother, I question if I will ever find either of those things in you again. Do you know what it takes to be a good friend? You have to be sort of nice to the people you want to be around you. You have to not be constantly full of garbage shit that spews out of your mouth and gets all over everything. You have to not be a lying, selfish, lying bitch. You have to not put your friends down in front of other people. You have to build your friends up, not effortlessly remind them of their shortcomings, quirks, or failures. A good rule of thumb? Don’t treat your kids like that, either. Yeah, don’t do that.

If you think I sound like a mean, obnoxious, petty bitch, it’s because you raised one. If you feel like my rage is justified, you’d be right about that, too. Maybe it’s nice to hear that I still think about you, and feel so strongly about you. Maybe it burns and you stopped reading long ago. Maybe you never picked up a single thing I’ve written because it hurts too much or because you are too afraid to see what I see. Maybe you’ve passed on, and someone will call me soon.

How did you think you could ever love your children, these’s factions of you, knowing how much you hate yourself? You reproduced not to give love, but to get love. What do you have now? What is this? It’s a vacuum. The Vacuum you made for us.

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