Aphrodite

18

The man snipping away my split ends had an ominous stare,

A curious stare, too.

"You look so tired, I can see it in your eyes," he told me, not judging, only observing,

"Rough patch?"

I only nodded and let him continue trimming.

I didn't tell him that my eyes had inherited generations of weariness,

Or that something in our collective unconscious knew the exhaustion of a poisoned love,

Or that my destiny made me weak.

I have albums full of melancholy, framed portraits of lost love

And eternal bitterness.

When I had more than I could carry, my mother took two fingers to her lips and kissed them,

Touching them to each image that floated through my mind.

They still linger there, those unhappy recollections and unaffectionate greetings.

She told me that would happen to me.

It had already happened to her.

Her smile was rare and beautiful,

A lily in a meadow guarded by weeds.

My father told me that was the way he saw her at first:

A flower in the garden, ready to pluck, roots and all.

Then, he told me she withered and grew ugly.

I wanted to tell him that he didn't give her water, didn't tend to her,

But I remembered that he never really tended to me, either.

He pretended he did.

He loved to act.

My father picks his teeth with wire hangers

And tarnishes the walls with pipe smoke and incense strong enough to make him gag.

He owns these walls, he says, voice gleaming with pride.

He likes to insist on his ownership.

He has pride in his children,

But only enough that will prop him up in conversation.

His hands have begun to shake like blades of grass.

He makes empty threats and dubious assertions.

I tallied them when I was a child, when he told me I knew nothing

And would never know more than him.

For he was a father, a true man and husband

Who seized and dictated and boasted

Without giving anything but his seed.

Yet, to the listening ears of a child he thought he knew,

To the wide-open mind of someone with no pride of their own,

His words meant much more than the dust on his wedding pictures.

He was no father.

But he was undoubtedly mine.

He told us, my siblings and I, that we would be like him and my mother someday,

That some of us would take, and some of us would be taken.

He urged me to uproot when all I wanted was to be a lily,

Gently pulled from my home in the cold earth,

Trimmed, placed in healing water, admired by someone like you.

He called me hopeless, but you gave me hope.

Was he right?

My mother had obsessions and compulsions that she dismissed as hobbies.

Every Saturday morning, she stood for hours at the stove, her altar,

Blending spices for tea in a pot of water so deep she could drown in it.

She stirred without stopping, without acknowledging her work.

It wasn't much, she would always say, she always did it.

I thought it was strange that the holy and the sacred could become the mundane, the routine,

The evil.

She told me that, someday, I would know why.

Maybe I do now.

When I learned my first lesson in love, I watched her throw dishes at my father's face.

Her tears splashed onto the carpet like raindrops in a hurricane.

Her voice was thunder, her eyes were lightning.

But God would not be mocked.

He brought her to her knees and kept her worshipping,

For life without him meant eternal damnation.

Thus, every weekend she stirred, the way she still does.

Every Monday she scrubbed the floor with sponges sopping wet,

Tuesday she watched clean clothes roll in the washing machine

And scrubbed the floor again.

Wednesday, she scrubbed and stirred and fed the plants.

Carnations are her favorite, too.

Thursday, she made socks. She only smiles at the blank faces of sock puppets.

Friday, she read the works of Dante and Meera Bai and Sylvia Plath, forgetting with each page,

And never on any day of the week did she tell me she loved me.

She had lost the capacity to love, let scorn wash over her memories of love

Since God had forsaken her five times.

And I wondered why, like a fool, and searched for clues.

I found that betrayal is written in our genealogy next to every other name,

Every generation a new cycle of creation, preservation, and destruction.

We are one in the same.

After all, no one can avoid reincarnation.

My bloodline is streaked with fear and despair

And the question of whether my god will turn away from the church.

Where could the god of love turn?

Maybe there's just too much love to give.

As locks of my hair plummeted to the floor, I said nothing to the man trimming.

I could only think of where I put my mother's recipe

And how to make you love me again.