Own-Tea-4836

I think about how I look like my mother

When she was my age

And I think about the men

who fall at their feet for me to touch them

Did she feel this power?

with two children at 19?

Did she have to carry the weight of the expectations

and the consequences

on her hip?

Did she carry her child alone,

Reminding herself

of what she's been told, by the men who beg,

that she can break the earth she walks upon.

Ways in which I'm an awful person

I. I don't speak to my mother anymore. I'll let it buzz, silenced, until the screen went dark again, until her voice became a glitch in my pocket. I told myself I was tired. Busy. Alive. I told myself she wouldn't want anything of me anyway: half-dressed, half-honest, half-trying. Sometimes I scroll through my childhood photos like a stranger picking over wreckage. Sometimes I imagine her in her kitchen, wondering where she went wrong. I imagine her setting a place for me at a table I will never sit at again. I imagine her forgiving me for being the kind of daughter who disappears without dying.

II. I practice conversations I know I'll never have. In the

And she just broke up with me because we don't spend enough time together. We live together, I've just been spending some nights in my office sewing in secret for her! But I spend too much time on my hobbies and not enough on her.

I should have known projects for partners are always cursed, at least we're the same size!

Make me feel a little better and share your cursed project stories please.