Jet Black Heart

track 001: wide awake or dreaming

TW: eating disorder mentioned.

track 001:   wide awake or dreaming

          When the car rolled to a stop in the driveway, Stevie tore her gaze from her scarred hands and confronted the familiar townhouse, the looming image of her childhood home, beyond the window pane by the passenger's seat. With hardened eyes, she considered its shape, how standard, like a regular doll house with its grease-streaked exterior and symmetrical windows, how clean, how unassuming of the thing it sheltered, the way a cage was unaware of its bird.

There was the garden she once helped her mother plant roses in when she was six. There was the pale hammock-seat shoved up against the fence she'd sat in a thousand times, looking up at the sky and watching the rain turn the road to glittering silver. There was the front door she'd thought about walking through and never coming back a million times over until she finally had.

And now, she was here. Right back where she started.

Numb, she stepped out of the car, as if walking in a dream. Digging her nails into the worn strap of her black duffel bag, Stevie surveyed the beaten street of the only suburbia she's ever known. In the last two years she'd been away from her hometown, nothing's changed. All the shops were still the same, except for the new record store her mother had driven past on the way home. One and a half years scraping by in New York, surrounded by the clamouring city where nobody slept and the streets were always busy, and she'd already forgotten what it was like to sit in the quiet. To have the suburban mundane settle over her body like a skin.

The sound of her mother slamming the trunk shut jerked her back to reality.

Short of pinching herself, Stevie glanced at her mother, and the reality of her situation slammed into her gut like an anvil.

Her mother's lips were pressed into a thin line as she dragged Stevie's luggages up the driveway, toward the house. Her back was ramrod straight, perfectly composed, not just from the tension but from decades of ballet conditioning. A long time ago, Sigrid Leung was a starlet, the prima ballerina. And then she fell pregnant, and her dreams of the stage had been swiped out from under her feet. But even after giving birth twice, you couldn't beat the poise out of her body, nor the elegant arch of her white neck, like a swan. When she was younger Stevie had to wonder what it must've felt like to have had such promise, and had to give it all up in a day. Now, though, Stevie didn't have to imagine. She knew. It was always more complicated than that.

The lines on her face have gotten more severe since the last time they'd seen each other. That'd been six months ago, just before Stevie had been checked into Creedmoore Psychiatric Center, just a couple days after one of her roommates had found her on their bathroom floor, a pair of scissors in hand, blood gushing like a faucet from her ravaged wrists.

Under the sleeves of her black, long-sleeved shirt, her arms prickled with the phantom memory. By now, the stitches had been taken out and the wounds scarred over. But the wound of memory was still fresh, rotting in the back of her mind.

Her mother, too, must've felt it. Felt the weight of her eldest daughter's afflictions. It's probably why they hadn't said a single word to each other the entire drive home from the airport.

All this time, and they hadn't spoken for hours, not from a lack of anything to say but because there was too much, and not enough words to say it with. The silence was oppressive, a dagger twisted in the gut, a third passenger nurtured to corporeality in the backseat. And isn't that funny, how a mother couldn't look at her own daughter sometimes?

In fact, Stevie couldn't remember a time when she'd seen her mother anything but stressed. Maybe it was better this way. This mutual cold shoulder. Stevie also couldn't remember a time she'd spoken to her mother without starting a fight.