Breakfast

Mother’s song is tired.  

A wilted, aged mimicry of what it used to be. Hollow inside, like if  I were to stick my hand out, it could go straight through, the barrier of her excuses cracking up like brown eggshell.  

I sit with my hand curled underneath my jaw, my eyes sweeping over  to my sister. Her hands are full of warm buttered grits and her cheeks bulge  with pepper eggs and crispy bacon. Flecks of food are smeared over her face,  high enough to reach her eyelashes. 

Mother calls my name. 

I look even though I’d rather die than look upon her now. What else  am I to do? 

She looks indescribable, ugly, awfully human.  

I hate seeing her like this.  

It regresses my mind. I’m forced to remember when I was nothing  but an ignorant child, when I thought it was enough to duck behind her body  to be safe. I’m forced to think about how good it felt to hide behind her  skirts, her legs like the bars of a prison, or perhaps, more fittingly a haven. 

A retreat from earth’s reality. A parting of the sea, a place for me at the  bottom, the water raging on with me in the middle. My mother, so powerful. When I was younger, I thought she was a god.  

I don’t like seeing her human. It sickens me. 

I look into her eyes, the sides of them wrinkled with crow’s feet,  the bottoms of them hanging heavy with a life I know too much about, and I  could truly puke. 

She’s so human it hurts. 

She’s so human and she’s asking me how many eggs I’d like. If I  want sausage instead of bacon, pancakes instead of grits. 

I can barely look at her for how my hatred pumps my belly full.

I hate this so much it consumes me, yet she does not see. My emotions rage, but they are locked behind steel doors. The entrance to my anger is  sewn shut, tightly, intentionally. 

I tell her I want grits, because I don’t wish to be difficult, but what  I want is to gouge my eyes out, so I never see anything again. I want to bleed  out here, right here, in the home I’ve always wanted to run away from.  

I know how this sounds. I sound suicidal. That isn’t true, but I don’t  care for labels. I don’t care what you think of me. There’s a canal across the  street. I’ve wanted to step out into the sun and run barefoot on hot gravel for  years, nosedive into the murky, dark water like an Olympic champion.

Drowning in the depths my one gold medal.  

I’ve wanted to escape this way since I realized there’s no such thing  as a safe haven. 

In this moment and every other one, I am a man who dreams of  death. I am a man whose mouth waters at the thought of it. A human trapped  in the confines of its own mind. Thirsting for things I can’t put names to.  Thirsting for normalcy, most of all. 

A normal family. A normal mother. It will never happen. I am a  mistake. This has all been a great mistake. 

My mother has no clue. 

How can I tell her? 

I don’t. We eat breakfast and as we do, we talk and we laugh.