Every day, you wake into the same stillness. Only the drips from the faucet greets to lend an ounce of the morning. You stretch to find the dining all set: fresh eggs fried to your liking, garlic rice primed to mend your dislike of remnants—leftovers. You called them scraps, one day.

Sink slops, like your worn-out jeans caught up in the clothespin. 

At your age, a blanket of calm embraces you. An afternoon nap is a tub of ice cream. Dark clouds form from the rage of heavenly bodies. Raindrops stop as soon as you wish to bathe in it. Just you wait, it starts to bounce again on the tin roof of the bathroom you dread.

On the day of your graduation, you don’t find your mother’s getup unusual: an ironed long-sleeved dress, black stockings stretched thin, makeup extra thick. Kids in your lane laugh.

“Only clowns wear that,” says one, but you try to dim them out. 

As long as the tassels stretch her lips into a smile—nothing matters. Even though you lied about getting triple stars in Math, or how you solved 78 x 9 faster than the class valedictorian. 

Time will tell, you thought, though it seemed silly. Clocks hold seconds, not a grasp of honesty. For once, you almost got something right, ‘til it struck 12 and you turned 13. 

Your father comes home—his strides are always filled with purpose. You were five when he fixed the leaky faucet; you were nine when he bought a couple of bleach—its tingly odor meant to scrub the floor clean. Now that you’re past 12, there’s a burst of clarity.

In biology, they don’t teach the mobility of women’s spines, how they hold dendrites heavier than men’s. Instead, textbooks frame it as conventional for women to bleed; it’s unnatural to occur in irregularities.

Every couple weeks, you’ll find stains. Every day, your mom’s gut molds a brusque hand. You want to catalogue phrases that uplift her. You mimic her once optimistic face. Find an expression. Find the word. Silence. Silence.     

Only the drips from the faucet greets to lend an ounce of the morning. You stretch to find the dining all empty, as if mocking your dislike of remnants—leftovers. Your worn-out jeans lie abandoned on the floor, beside them, a suitcase. Another thing biology fails to teach: the durability of spines. 

A tingly odor, then, strikes to mask a pool of blood. 

You wish you had a concealer. You wish she wore her makeup extra thick.

An ambulance stops the stillness. Onlookers gather—in pity, in anger.

You start biting your nails—and oh, how you never stopped since.

- Jan Clarisse Lingon

(Illustration by Chynna Mae Santos/FEU Advocate)