DOAMNE DUMNEZEU

By Nicole Marinescu | @nicole.marinescu

I talk about my mother a lot. Mimic her accent and repeat the same anecdote to the same people around the same table. I hate that fucking table. Covered in dried booze and crumbs of whatever I attempted to cook. It doesn’t taste like hers.

She spends a lot of time in the kitchen. We talk a lot, too. It’s not about anything. She tells me how my sister is doing, maybe a funny story from work. Sometimes she complains about how Mayor DeBlasio made the speed limit in Queens 25 but how she won’t speed. I tell her about the boy who broke my heart. I want to tell her more, but I can’t afford rent without her, so I keep my mouth shut and complain about how expensive parking is in Boston.

I used to hate Boston. How much it wants to be New York. How close it is to New York. How the cold cuts your skin, and the only peace I know is sitting around the same table I hate with people I love. My mom hates New York. I think she’s going to leave. How do you leave the place that gave you everything? She did it once before. I guess I did the same thing when I drove up here. I kissed girls and tattooed my skin. I stopped believing in God and swore I would never baptize my child. I still do the cross when I sit on a plane and I thank God everyday for keeping me alive when that’s the last thing I wanted. But how can I pull my hand from my forehead to my chest and across both breasts and still think he isn’t real? I hurt the woman that gave me everything.

I think God made my mother. I don’t know where he was when he made me. I cry on the toilet wondering why God left me like this. I cry when the boy I gave my body to tells me it wasn’t enough. I still shave my legs. I tell myself it’s for him so he thinks I’m beautiful and not just some girl he kissed in between strangers in a basement. But, we were strangers too. He lingers in my dreams like a distant memory. Maybe he’s thinking about me. My hands and my lips. How I tell him everything he wants to hear and be everything he wants to see. There is nothing inherently unlovable about me, but I can’t help but wonder if it’s because I always have a cigarette in my hand, and vodka tastes like water so I drink until I can’t hear God anymore.

My mother would be ashamed that I have her habits. How when my temper rises I cannot seem to form coherent sentences and tears fall so heavily they make me choke. And how my response is filling my body with things that keep it comfortably numb. I can’t feel my heart when I think of him. I’m still choking on air. Maybe I’ll be enough one day. For him. For her. For God.