Little northview, who are you?
When I was younger you were love. You lived in the hallway leading up to my parents’ bedroom for a long time. I remember my socks skating along the wooden aisle in anticipation of steady, familial embrace, quick glimpse of you, quick warm sensation, quick crash into a shut door. I remember tiptoeing through the night and shamefully passing you in my failed attempt at sleep, you practically held their door open for me.
You felt like an ode to the mother and child, to my mother. Were you a portrait of her pregnant with me? I often wonder. Nevertheless, through you, I felt her. Your image reminded me of my safety as I dove into a duvet of armed forces; you guarded the door.
You were probably my second pair of boobs, after my mother's of course. Boobs and vaginas were everywhere growing up— interestingly, not many penis’. There are giant companion paintings that stand proudly in my mom’s bathroom: splotchy black and white strokes to form some semblance of a lady bent over (they don't hold a candle to you). When I was ten, while rummaging through my mom’s hair products on a playdate, my friend Merel Kanter asked if my parents were really into sex art. I didn't see anything volatile or inappropriate in the images throughout my house; I thought they were quite beautiful. I thought my parents were cool.
I am inclined to believe that something about you should have made me slightly uncomfortable at some point in my life. Your full breasts and belly so on display, so perfect. There is something sexy about you. If I were inside you, logically, I should think you would reek of cigarettes and bad perfume that would suffocate my nostrils and lungs to a degree the smoke could never. The air would be sticky, your bodies would be sticky; I would feel claustrophobic for your child. There would be something sickly about the scene. Surely. But I don't believe this. Your hues are warm, red, and orange; you are warm. I think you would smell like the light from the window, it would be the perfect temperature, and everything would be a soft material that I would want to cocoon in. I, too, would strip my clothes and then lie my head on your belly. And close my eyes, maybe forever.
I wanted to look like you. I wanted to feel like you— how you made me feel and the subjectivity of how you made others feel. I still do. I don't know if I will ever stop trying to. You are womanhood to me in a lot of ways.
Then you disappeared. I don't know when you disappeared; maybe I disappeared. As I withered away, I forgot about you.
I was sixteen, and my relationship with my mother turned from warm hues to cold ones—no more reds and oranges, but blacks and whites. There was no room for you to exist when I was intolerant of your symbolism. I began to try to become you in all the wrong ways, in the exploitative ones.
In my defense, you were moved to the living room. I never went to the living room; I didn't feel welcome. Maybe things would have been better if you never moved. You were now the protector of my family's shared space, and I didn't feel deserving of your protection.
Night after night, I would isolate, my bubblegum pink ceiling turning my juvenile room into a cozy haven in the warm light of my lamp and rose-scented candles. My stomach would grumble; I would cry. My mom would cry; my door stayed shut. Knocks after knocks, I retreat. I take hour-long baths, I watch confessionals on YouTube (sad girls mostly, coming clean), watch Mukbangs, read and reread Play It as It Lays, fold stripe socks, lose my period, and now I could never look like you.
I needed my mother. I needed the love I felt sliding down the hall at maximum speed as I flew into her aching, oozing embrace. I yearned for the safety you reminded me of, which only she could tangibly provide. She tried, but I resisted. They all tried, but I kept resisting. You didn't exist. In removing myself from my family, I lost you. In breaking my family, I lost you. I didn't deserve you.
Two years went by, and they had finally had enough, and I was moved too. Clementine, despite the name, was starchy, bright yellow, and smelled like kitty litter. The thick Miami heat only heightened the temperature drop upon walking inside the center; it was cold like naked weigh-ins, ventilated hospital gowns revealing my skeletal frame. Within the first hour, there was a pound of fettuccine Alfredo in front of me. My heart sank; this was so bizarre. I reckoned with my freakishness. What kind of person is punished with Alfredo?
I was mute, fixed myself daily with a new book in the corner crevice of the couch, incrementally scribbling in my notepad horrible things about the other “clients”— they were anorexics, we all were. I only spoke to wail on the phone to my mom as I peeled their hideous yellow wallpaper from its already cracked disposition around the corners of the landline. I would think about The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and how I read it when I toured my new high school at fourteen. Frustrated with my concession to the archetypal hysterical women, I roll my eyes, a lot. My mom would wail back to me on the phone; eventually, she stopped picking up.
The unborn baby inside you, created out of maternal warmth, learns to feel herself uncomfortable in the world, unlike you. She tries to shrink, to disappear, but you can't help her; you try. You try, you try.
Eventually, she picked me up. My mom and I bake. We make hot chocolate with whipped cream and marshmallows everyday for snack. My mom threw out my levis while I was away. My mom brushes my hair and draws me bathes. I return to the capacity of a child. I return to the living room. I doe my eyes in acknowledgment at you. I feel it again. The empty aching in my heart slowly starts to hum with the contentedness maternity bares. Maybe I concede again. You protect me too now.
The love that was concealed in dark wooden walls and hallowed winter trees starts to creep out of hibernation. I spend less time in my room, I spend more time around you. I never recover— I heal. I locate better senses of my womanhood, you bare light and hope. You endeavor to strip back fetishism and delight in the female gaze.
You are my mother in many ways. You have the same tones, the same confidence, the same beauty, the same unbothered effervescence, and the same love. Both fierce and temperamental, polarizing. I hope to become you, I hope I am on my way, I hope you meet my daughter one day.
Sole Magazine