Mapping Nights

I float through the apartment the way a half-drowned memory moves through a mind slow insubstantial still dangerous if you get too close. They’re all sleeping. Wife folded into her dream-rituals dog muttering occasionally in her small dusk language and the child my child a quiet comet fallen into blankets cheek flushed with the uncomplicated trust I lost somewhere in my twenties or earlier depending on which version of the story I pick. I stand in her doorway and muse there are rooms only mothers can enter and chambers only women who have burned themselves down and built new names in the ashes can survive. This night this nothing-special night becomes a kind of map one of those ancient ones drawn on scraped hide and human stubbornness where the edges read here there be monsters. Monsters born mostly of me, to be honest. The shame the one that flickers like a neon sign from the old world says you were feral once you were reckless you were open to everything like your skin was a border no one checked and sometimes you still miss it the speed the salt the ruin. The desire that stubborn cartographer keeps sketching you in red marking the places you touched and the places you wanted to and the ones you walked away from because even hunger needs rest eventually. Becoming that strange faultline runs right through your ribs splitting the girl you were the woman you pretend to be the creature you allow yourself to become when the moon is too bright or the vodka too honest or the loneliness decides to speak. Silence the old geography sits in your throat an entire city of unsaid things humming like faulty wiring because mothers don’t get to confess that sometimes they feel too full or too empty or too wrong for the life they built. And loss persistent old bastard is everywhere in the bodies you no longer inhabit in the nights you survived in the people who mistook you for salvation in the selves you killed so you could become a gentler danger. I circle her bed soft careful as if stepping through a constellation you could break by breathing wrong. Her hand twitches. Her lip curls. Some dream tugs her deeper. The room smells of childhood that impossible fragrance equal parts future and fossils. I look at her and suddenly every version of me every wild year every stranger’s sheets every club bathroom mirror where I looked like a myth made of exhaustion every knife-edge decision every moment I thought I won’t make it through this all of it orbits her like debris caught in a gravity stronger than regret. What if she becomes me. The question arrives uninvited as all dangerous questions do. What if she inherits my maps my broken compasses my lust for implosion my tenderness so sharp it cuts my inability to sleep on nights when the past starts whispering in a language only my bones understand. I lay a hand near her head not touching just tracing because motherhood is a long apprenticeship in not hurting the world you brought into being. I think if she becomes me she will also become everything I never let myself be because children steal the version of the future you’re too cowardly to touch and live it without asking permission. I think if she becomes me she will crawl out of every ruin laughing because she’ll see all the exits I never noticed. I think if she becomes me she will hold her own daughter one day and orbit the sleeping body and wonder terrified and tender how something so small could command the tides of your entire life. I stand there long enough for the cold to bite my ankles long enough for the shame to quiet for desire to retreat for becoming to soften for silence to unclench for loss to loosen its teeth. When I finally turn away the night feels mapped. Not clearly not neatly but truthfully. And truth even when jagged is a kind of mercy. I slip back into the dark hallway a woman carrying five maps inside her and all of them lead here.