He couldn’t help the trembling in his hands as he held the folded up letter, written neatly and thoughtfully on lined notebook paper, and stained with a few teardrops. The ink on the paper bled in those areas, but it was still legible. It wasn’t easy for him to put that note on her night stand, knowing that it was probably the last time that he’d ever be in this room. It would be the final time he’d be able to see the drawing of a pink lily that he had drawn her years ago, framed on her night stand, proof that at the time it meant something to her; maybe it still did, but he wouldn’t ever know. He had long given up on trying to figure out what went on in her head.

He wondered what she would think when she read it. Would she be finally be receptive to hearing what he had to say when reading a letter he had poured his heart into? Could she push past her own defensiveness and ego to try to comprehend how much she had hurt him? Or would she just continue to stay in the world she lived in, trapped in a bubble of misery and cognitive dissonance of her own making? He didn’t know the answers to those questions, and he might not ever know.

He hoped that maybe she could be happy someday, maybe she could go to therapy, work through her own trauma and realize that she had unintentionally continued the cycle of generational trauma that maybe at one point she vowed to end. Maybe she would listen to him and stop denying the trauma she had caused. Maybe the desperate words he had exclaimed and cried for her to listen to, many times throughout his life, would finally resonate with her.

As much as he loved her because of the blood shared between them, he couldn’t deny the rage and hatred that bubbled up inside of him every time she refused to take responsibility for her words and actions, or when her justifications for her behavior and paranoia were stupidly infuriating; he felt like he might just explode from the anger he felt.

He didn’t want to be angry, he didn’t want to be miserable like she was. He wanted to change his life and make it better, make it one worth living, one where he was happy, and knew that he was loved by the people he cared for and that in turn cared for him in his life. The vow he made to himself to end the cycle of suffering and trauma was one that he intended to keep.

For him, this was liberation, freedom, a new start, but to her, it was the biggest act of defiance that she had ever seen from him. He wanted to hope that maybe one day she would understand why he had to do this, why he had to go. Maybe one day she could heal herself, maybe one day, she could be the mother he had always deserved but never got. But hoping tended to lead to a lot of disappointment, so he believed that it was better to not get his hopes up for a day that might never come.

He took a shuddering deep breath, held it, and let out a more relaxed exhale. Saying goodbye to her made him want to cry, for the grief of a relationship that was never healthy, of what could’ve been; but he also felt like a weight was lifted off his shoulders, a burden that he had been carrying for a very long time.

He took in one last look at the room, over at the drawing, her white, wooden nighstand, the blue fleece blanket that was neatly made on the queen size bed and felt soft yet frizzy under his fingertips, the equally blue cotton pillowcases on the two stiff pillows, the wooden duck statue on top of his father’s cigar box that seemed to follow you with its only visible eye, the sliding glass door of her dresser that was off kilter and never closed right, and the slightly dusty framed photo of a younger version of him on top of his father’s dresser, covered in decorations that the two of them had placed. He wondered if his father had put it there or if she did. He would never know, it’s not like he could ask anymore.

After he walked out of his mother’s room, he was brought back to reality by a car horn blaring from the driveway. He told the room he loved her, and he grabbed his bags off the floor before closing the door to her room shut. He walked out of the front door from a prison that his family had created into a world of possibilities, one where he would be able to start a new life, where he could find peace amongst the pain that would never truly leave but hopefully someday would lessen.