The Triton Series: The Dirty Adepts

I feel like a prisoner in my own skin; it holds me with claustrophobic connotations. These days, I’m more like my mother; dripping in melanin, fascinating the masses with the coils growing from my scalp and my articulate speech. A bar set so low for me to be a spectacle, yet so high for me to be a step underneath average. As long as I am the main attraction, the obedient, show-worthy, pet, my presence is welcome in their cages. I can only look at my mother and wonder how a soul can harbor so many scars. My shower ran as if someone were looking for it. Steam wrapped me in a blanket of steam as I let the water run over the barrier and flood my bathroom floor. It floods over my bare feet as I sit on the toilet, staring at his blood on my hands. I could've sworn that it must have been something in the air, something that dug only into certain minds, fragile minds, broken psyches or some shit. What did the world curse me with while I dreamt of a sweet release? Peace with my father seemed within my reach, but something woke me and it was pissed off, angry, hungry for a release of its own. The alluring aroma of pancakes and eggs rush through my nostrils as steam scatters across the ceiling from my devil's spit of a shower. I barely get his liquid gold unstained from my skin and I still find my life--uneventful. Though I have not had a full night's sleep in over three days, I feel rejuvenated after cleaning the caked mud and flesh from between my toes. Shoving my stained clothes into my laundry basket, I quickly dress just to drag my unwilling self down the stairs. Each creak of my descent haunts me, a ghost of my ever-growing anxiety. 7:30am on a Saturday morning and I am already back in this cauldron of melting emotions trying to convince myself I even left. The humor in depression is that it is a glorified body snatcher; a friend in a dark capsule I've swallowed dry time after time. My mother greets me with a less than welcoming glimmer in her eyes that runs a thick streak of ice through my foul blood. The silence, the same overly familiar silence that has been peeling us like fickle fruit for the past year, takes its well-deserved seat at our table. It hasn't been the same. How could it be? That empty seat at the table snatches the appetite right from my mouth, especially these days. I suddenly find myself sitting, lingering over the short stack with no desire to fill my stomach. "Eat something, Teagan. You haven't eaten in days," "I just haven't been hungry," I say. It has been this way for exactly 96 hours and 13 minutes. I can barely ingest anything without immediately feeling sick afterwards. My mother has chalked it up to the growing grief surrounding my father’s death anniversary. Despite the lack of sustenance, I feel stronger, more observant to small things such as the faint hue of the sky or the change in my mother’s body wash. My senses are standing on the edge, contemplating whether to dive off or back away into safety. I’ve become accustomed to the stillness between my mother and I, almost fond of the way it skims in and out of the walls like wind through our house’s bones. You would never know that she used to love like she invented the feeling, that she used to be my sunflower in any winter that life casts. Death blanketed us in its hawkish embrace, making igloos out of our once warmed hearts and we have worn ourselves to dust trying to change it. With that, we swept ourselves under Marblehead’s carpet. She places her plate gently on the table's face before pulling out her chair and sitting down. The silence has not aged her gracefully. I can see the heavy years in the wrinkles above her high cheekbones and the waning elasticity in her once flawless skin. She gazes aimlessly at the small stack of pancakes she had placed in between us. A slab of butter craters in the center of them, melting down their side in a type of raw emotion. I catch her in these moments more often than I had before, wondering what life even means anymore. I gaze upon her and see puzzle pieces of myself resting carelessly in the way she carries herself and in the hardness of her stare. We share the same skin tone, but not the same pain nor the same mind. Her and I are everything the other tries desperately not to be and that designates our home as no man's land. She looks at me, but she doesn't see me anymore; how could she when I don't even see myself. Her look is one of disdain for a presence you can't shake even when you leave the room. My father's death haunts the air we breathe and creeps under our skin every time we get close to shutting the wound. We have gradually drifted from one another; both freezing alone in this constant emotional winter. My father, like many men, was life's whore. He spent the last three hundred and sixty-five days of his life being bent over by the things he couldn't control anymore. Their marriage, taped together by amateurs, had finally shattered into unrecognizable shards of toxicity he would leave to fester on the grounds below. I watched them staple smiles on their faces for the world outside these walls and hated that the facade was socially acceptable. Their truth was simple, yet all they did was lie.