A forest-green & tan striped couch, littered with burn holes from forgotten cigarettes, serves as foreshadowing of what lies ahead for the forgotten flower lying upon it.
She curls up on this couch, as it's the best view to admire mom from across the room, mesmerized as she magically transforms eyelashes into feathers with the swipe of a wand.
Ignorant and innocent, she patiently awaits for her time to bloom; yearns for her petals to unfurl like mom's.
Flawless Perfection.
But gradually, mom's smokey cat eyes became dark shadows of hollow sunken ships, and bright rosy skin faded to washed-out colors, like those of the green-striped couch, stripped by sunlight year after year.
Now,
mom buried the bones of the delicate structure she built from inside her womb, and decades later her daughter's dismantled skeleton is nothing but scattered ruins of an abandoned sunken city, polluted by the rotten flesh of unwanted fruit; a weak foundation destined to be crumbled relics of an ancient past.
Never once did Mom leave flowers at the grave that she dug.
I imagine the sweetest sounds to a brand-new mother are the screams and wails of her newborn child, reassurance that it's vibrant life lights up the room as blindingly as the birth of a newborn star, a commanding presence louder than that star's explosive death.
On the contrary, the sweetest sound to her mother was the silence when she muffled the screams; from underwater, you cannot hear screams for help, or much of anything at all.
Mom's solace was the peace felt when muddy water filled her lungs, the darkness found from deep within a drug-induced sleep, where you cannot hear a child weep.
I had mentioned the young girl always wanted to be like her mom. Like mother like daughter, all grown up, I tried ****** for the first time. I held true to mom every time the rush of warm blood filled the syringe, visual evidence that the blood was thicker than the bond mom and I shared.
Usually when a person's life is ruined by a parent's addiction they will stay an ocean's length away from drugs - but I am a curious cat, ignoring the fact that I do not have 9 lives, and so I welcomed this substance into my veins, into my brain.
The brown lady would wrap me up in her arms each night, then gently dip me in the familiar flame of a fire's flickering tongue. She became the only company that could never overstay its welcome.
And so, for a time I became my mother: "Flawless Perfection." I will admit, ****** is one hell of a drug, but STILL, I cannot see...how could ****** steal my mother's love?