Shouts. Screams. Cursing. Fighting. Empty promises. Abandonment. Unspoken goodbyes.

No one should experience such a separence from their mother, the only person who didn’t complain about excreting you into their existence. Well, I hope not. I like to think not, so let’s think not for just a second.

My mother was of the affectionate kind; she always gave a physical display of her affection. A hug, a kiss, or a simple caress as she smiled down upon you. I loved her motherly PDA, until I turned six.

At the age of six, your parents sworn by their parental abilities to shoo away all the bad monsters that tucked neatly under your bed. My father terrified me with his monster voices, and so I sworn by my mother that she remedied my fears with her PDA and warm smiles. I remembered how velvety her voice lulled me into a peaceful oblivion, and cradled my fears away into the winds of the weeping willows.

“The monsters who hide under beds sometimes steals socks, but other times steal souls,” she’d say, “but they will not steal my baby’s.”

It was until she kept chanting this false promise into existence. I have felt nothing, seen nothing, nor heard anything that terrified me more, until that very chant unlocked the door to the demon world of endless nights and fitful sleeps.

“The monsters who hide under beds sometimes steals socks, but other times steal souls, but not my baby’s.”

Those very words still haunt me today as I stare up at her ghostly face. It looks like her, sounds like her, smells like her… feels like her, and I am terrified as every nerve ending fights for the real. I try to thrash, scream, shake myself into reality, but it’s my paralysis that will kill me. As I lay here, accepting the grief of my struggles, I begin to question myself. Am I six or thirty. Am I that six year-old little girl who missed her mother’s PDA, or am I the thirty year-old who regrets never saying sorry or I love you to her mother after that dreadful argument that killed her in the end?

As I stare up into her ghostly face, I knew my soul died on the latter.