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I look at her name and try to stare at it hard enough to make it come alive. Make her be alive again. But it doesn't work, nothing works.

“I did everything I could,” I lied without realizing it. The wind blows through the trees. The stars shine on top of us. And my heart breaks all over again.

“There are fragments of you in everything that is missing, mom.” I place my hand on the stone, and it's colder than my fingers. And that destroys me a little more, because it means she'll never be warm again. “Is this the end?” I whisper. “You just... left like this and let me carry on with the noise in my head?”

I close my eyes for a second, but when I open them again, it's all still there, so I lower my head shamefully. “I'm tired,” I say. “There is something inside me that has already suffered before me, mom.” My throat tightens suddenly, and I no longer have enough control to hide it. “I feel like something inside me... broke a long time ago,” I continue, lowering my voice. “But I’m still making wishes. Any time I don’t know where to go, and what to do, I make a wish.”

I stay there, without moving, without wanting to move. As if the whole world had shrunk to this stone, this name, and I can no longer understand how anyone can live around it. Because I can’t. A firefly rests on her carved name, and I cry lying down against her stone.

For a few minutes, I'm not cold anymore.

“I hope you’re not hurt anymore, Mom. I hope Dad will never find you again.”

I hope I can join you soon…

87

Mireya

Play - Funny by Searrows

I’ve done it, again

She didn’t choose to leave

I need to get away from him, I just need to go home.

I’m burying her once again, I buried the version of herself I thought left us, and I’m doing it all over again because she never did.

I spent years thinking I wasn’t enough, that Milo wasn’t enough. All I do is remember. Every anniversary, every night I hurt myself thinking I deserved it for pushing her away, every tear I let out thinking my mother chose death over us.

My body moves, my legs keep carrying me and my mind drifts away. There’s something in my chest that’s growing at each step I take, it keeps pushing the images back in my brain, the blue sweater I wore the night we found out, how my arms were itching and I kept wearing it because I thought I deserved it, that it didn’t matter.

I want to throw up.

Mom died…no. Mom was taken.

I press my hands against my temples as I keep walking. I close my eyes, shaking my head to keep the images away. But they keep coming back. She’s young, sitting on the rooftop staring at the sky and wishing that her mother can still see her and maybe forgive her. She waits until she falls asleep. She waits the next day thinking her mother might come back.

She keeps waiting and waiting. Until she stops trying to un-love the ghost of her. Because she convinced herself her own mother had stopped loving her first.

I keep walking, and I wish I could sit next to her again, at the edge of the cliff, hug her and repeat how sorry I am. For every scar I had to make her carve onto her skin. For making her believe she was never enough. For carrying a punishment that was never hers.

She’s me, and she’s still waiting but it’s too late now.

He lied to you, Mireya. He lied. He lied.

I ball my hands into fists, thin crescents of blood rise where my nails dig too deep. But I don’t feel anything, so I press harder.

Stupid. So Stupid, Mireya.

When I finally reach my front door, I don’t remember the last forty minutes.

I shakily push my keys into the lock and the door creaks open, the smell of stale beer and vodka permeates the air as I step in.

“…Is that you… Mireya?” My father calls out and I know that he’s drunk. I try to ignore him and make a start with cleaning the empty beer cans from the table, putting them into the trash can absentmindedly. Blood stains the glass and I keep focusing on the way my hands move.

Laughter bellows from the living area and I wince from the sound. I turn picking up anything I can find, putting it all in the garbage bag.