Afternoon Sleep

I want to write a story about my mother. I don’t think I could ever love anyone the way I love her. And yet, if she knew what was twisted inside me, she would be sad. It felt like discovering that the child you gave birth to had a disability. At the same time, I couldn’t face her struggles—I ran from them in order to become myself. But becoming oneself is never simply a matter of running away. It is about exchanging one difficulty for another, trading an intolerable burden for a tolerable one. Through my writing, I look at her. I look at myself. We are expected to remain silent, to comply, and society mistakes this silence for instinct. An utterly transparent misfortune—so ordinary, so common—that it becomes invisible to others. I have placed many things into this egg, including that quiet misfortune, and there are more that I don’t know what to do with, so I’ll have to leave them aside for now. I am not interested in single stories, no hierarchy among them. I carefully collect each piece and let them speak to one another. It’s a process of creating a constellation.