One day, I’d always say, I’ll get away from there, away from yelling, and thieving, away from nights spent worrying about why she wasn’t home, worrying even after she had stumbled in as the sun rose through the trees, preaching “I’m the mother don’t worry about me, you’re the child”, but a child doesn’t steal bottles of wine from the cabinet and pour them in the sink, knowing mom wouldn’t remember, hoping it will slow her descent into madness, a child who flushes cigarettes down toilet, bleaching blood off of clothes from inebriated stumbles, a child I had not been in a while, so one day, the one where a stranger brought my brother home in the back of a gray car, having known that in a drunken stupor, my mother wouldn’t have been able to get him home on those old richity bikes, on that day I left, packed a black duffle, and a backpack for my brother, broke open the gorged piggy bank, called a cab, and left quickly, to ensure that the liquid laced fire of the sleeping dragon wouldn’t be invoked, wouldn’t try and stop me, because I could only find confidence in the quiet, the purr of the taxi helped me keep my edge, once I was in silence I broke, let the flood through, I was free, in that one day I was no longer the strong one, or the worried one, or the mom, I was the free one, the young one, the “it’s your turn to mess up so YOU can grow” one, I wasn’t the—one day—one, I was the today one.
