Written by Sarah Chack 

Art by Julian Dindal 

I was ten the first time I realized

my mother wouldn’t look me in the eye,

not directly, not purposefully:

a two way mirror that had, now,

become one way.

Sitting on her bed,

halfway between child and adult,

a weight that was not my own

fell onto me:

the ghostly remnants of mothers past,

pulling and pulling and pulling

until my feet touched the wooden floor

of their long forgotten house.

My mother’s hands gently touched her face,

prodding and pulling the skin,

pronouncing the creases around her eyes—

ones that I had only ever seen

in the warped reflections of

salted car doors and dirtied bedroom mirrors—

with each streak of pigment

left behind. Her perfume

wafted through the air,

as comforting as it had always been;

the sweet smell of vanilla and smoke

was a mixture that I could not recreate now

even if I tried.

Twisting and turning in her dress—

the new one, she’d told me,

she’d bought half-off at the store

for her sister’s bridal shower—

she glanced at me through the mirror

(always through the mirror).

My mother never told me

that I was anything other than perfect.

This, I know now, was a lie.

She hated her body and all its parts,

(the lives it had carried,

the life it had lived)

but I thought it was perfect.

My god, I truly thought it was perfect.

There was never any other belief

in my newly formed mind.

But her body was mine, my body hers,

twin outlines made twenty six years apart,

and I wondered:

how could she say she hated her body

and still love mine?