The Beautiful Flame

For my mother, anger was the seed of her creation. When all seemed lost, anger was there to warm her at night, to promise honeyed lies of vengeance to strike down on people who had done her wrong, pettiness spiraling into hopes and dreams. It was the vessel of her soul, for all she had left in the end was her anger, her tears, and her bitter memories.

Anger was a fire lit up inside of her. After all, it brought her to this country, with smooth lines of lanes filled with not a single pothole in sight, even if they weren’t paved with gold like promised. How dare people think this unwed mother of two could do nothing more than stay in her lane, how they yelled how she should live her life. She would show them. She would be everything her own mother didn’t see: the strong matriarch of a family left in ruin from a father who walked out 20 years prior; a winner in the battle for love and success against her own son; a survivor above all. This would be her mark, her claim to fame, to become the one who outdid everyone else with their internal family political games and things called options. She would be the son so desperately wanted despite two already in existence, the flaming blue tinges of a perfect fire creating everything imagined by a mother who remembered men past and placed their expectations onto an unwanted girl.

There was freedom in the air that was fresh and new, but at the cost of sanity and patriotism. It was all so new to her, exhilarating and breathtaking, that she dove headfirst into her new love. “Brazilian by blood, American by choice” was her motto, engraved into the scars on her wrists, hearkening back to a time when anger couldn’t be called upon to save her. “It wouldn’t happen again this time,” she vowed. There was too much fire from the flames shimmering through her hair against the sunlight to the light brown of her eyes that turned to green when she cried. It would keep her warm on nights when the cool of the desert would saunter in, preventing her thoughts from overtaking her. The fire would protect her as long as she had a reason, anything to stay angry.

And so she found it. For a third, fourth, fifth, and sixth time she married, for her looks were never in question with her long dancer legs, a smile that could cut glass when pointed at you and the black jack dealer’s graceful hands she had when pitching cards. Her dance partners created the spark of memories that flamed her anger. There was always a reason to be mad, for when someone doesn’t read your mind or when you are in a battle of wills pride to pride against the wall, no one wins. Friendships started to wither and die. Anyone who questioned her motives became an enemy, someone to cut loose yet again, someone to become a memory. There would be more, new exciting people to fill in these roles in her one woman show.

Until there wasn’t. Until all that was left was despair. The flames of her anger had finally petered out. There was no guide post, no northern star with its warmth and bright lights. All that was left was loneliness filling her to the brim with her memories of regret. Until she learned how to finally be happy with herself instead of with other people. Until she learned that her life as is could be enough.

It’s true that confronting yourself with your own limitations is something that is too painful for too many. They are what allows us to metamorphosize into something more than what we currently are. We shed the shell of failures, the mistakes, the learned behaviors, breathing it into a new beautiful being. While memories are pockets of perfection, reality stripped away, then romanticized into what we want post hindsight, but never touched for they can lose their glimmer even moments that show us our ugliness, it’s easy to separate the two, pretending that they don’t know one another, that they aren’t roommates in the same large floor plan. My memories are of lilies surrounding me, permeating through the air, enveloping all of my senses. The petals, the only things I see, the luscious sweetness with the bite of their pollen, the soft touch of them sliding against my cheek. If the tears forming are from allergies, my frustrations, my happiness, or my anger, who is to say? After all, I am my mother’s daughter, forever changing. Although she is the fire, I am the water boiling, the energy of it in my depths, never showing a lick of flame, yet the effects are known by those wiser and paying attention.

My memories dance around me, picking which one to be my next partner, each dancing their own dance. Is it the samba this time, hips and thighs moving in rhythms of drums felt into the very veins of my soul, pounding my heart faster and faster, the chicka-chicka-chicka-chicka of the shells preventing me from thinking, only moving, only being? Is it the waltz, the intentional formal courtship following every specific agreed upon rule, back rigid, form straight, not moving a hair out of place? Is it the mosh pit full of painful memories slamming into me, a crowd of mistakes bumping from every angle, stepping on my toes with fists thrown in, over inundating me with fear and freedom? Or will it be my usual dance partner, the one with no rules, no beat, only arms flailing, hips shaking badly and in poor time, my back rolling behind me as my shoulders sway? The memory of the times I defied my own expectations, took risks I look back at in wonder and pride, things that I learned from my mother’s hip as much as I did from her defying the expectations of others.

These things cannot be touched, for if they were touched they would disappear into dust, details slipping away with each passing instant out of my fingers, grasping at even the finest parcel. A broken hourglass of faded memories no longer held up to the highest altar. No longer filled with wonder and what ifs, the scent of them thick with possibilities and different lifetimes. Lessons learned, people I could be, people she was, the venn diagram of who we both still are.

I am capable of great cruelty. It’s a knee-jerk response. After all, I was taught how to wound not to kill, but to wrench at my mother’s knee, my umbilical cord a stem set with phasers locked on stun and daze, aiming for the precise point that will hurt the greatest. That moment you’ve elegantly crafted to destroy me based on 15 years of data compiled will not be remembered. I will completely forget you from my mind, erase you from my history with the click of my index finger to my temple until you are nothing for I know that will hurt you the most. Memories become kindling for my fuel of this kind of anger. It takes too many apologies, acts of forgiveness, moments of conversations trying to understand and understand and understand until finally I let go. When I cut you out, scars left puckered and bleeding, there was no chance for redemption.

And yet, this thing gnaws at me, begging to be let loose, lying to me sweetly as if some inch forward will somehow remove it completely from me. It’s a gene that has been passed down through the generations, a mutated track of DNA on top of the protein that builds our pitch black, curly hair. I can harness it when I so choose, a weapon of a paladin blessed by the gods. It’s useful, of course, as all bad things that appear to be good are. I fight for justice, for peace, for a better world; it comes in handy when being righteously angry. After you’ve been lured in by the hood of the charisma it pretends to be, you feel the the hair on the backs of your arms raise in a jolt, forcing them to scream out that you’re in danger, warning you to slowly back away from the predator bent on your destruction, one that will salt the very earth you stand on. It purrs in delight when I give in, a piece of lighting hitting struck ground.

Even in the moments I look back at my mother, things she has suffered through both from her own choices and those thrown at her, I have empathy. I know that joy in giving in, feeling the beast come out lashing against those not deemed worthy, those warranting that rage. It comes with great cost, one too much to bear. It begins to stop looking for reasons to come out, only doing so because it feels right. It no longer becomes the mark of the righteous, only one of those lost.

The neon sign in my head that reads, “You are either perpetuating the cycle of trauma or you are breaking it,” has been flashing on the hour, by the hour. Almost as if it’s a reminder that this is a decided upon act every day. My memories lay before me, sprawled out, no longer dancing but in a silent calm, watching me make my next steps, unsure of what I will do, my silhouette lined with the color of the sign. Do you wake up, brush your teeth with your minty toothpaste and your toothbrush with your two-minute timer, drink your coffee black like your father did, and continue on in the footsteps of your parents, or do you diverge where you need to?

I look back at my mother with her two kids by 31, with me on the way two years from now. Knowing who I am now, where I am in my life, I could not have moved across an ocean without knowledge of a language on my lips, with the dreams of promise on the horizon. The mother I knew was different than the mother who left two children behind with a promise to return, keeping them with older aunties in broken down homes sleeping on sofas in hopes of that dream to bear fruit of American exceptionalism. The mother I knew never could break free from the circle of the father who left her behind at the age of seven, leaving that wound raw and exposed for her own children to suffer with her to more easily bear that pain. The mother I know now has grown, a year of introspection and solitude forcing that hand, yes, but also the years finally taking their toll with patience finally winning the upper hand.

Despite this, these traumas are still not easily broken. They are chains that have bound us to our ancestors in solidarity for lack of anything else, when there was no other common ground for a lack of knowledge. It doesn’t mean we are forced to forgive and forget. Yet, it’s our responsibility to move forward, to prevent introspection from being something discovered too late. We are constantly growing beings, evolving into new iterations of ourselves. It’s never too late to find our way back to one another. It becomes a little seed bound to something greater.