33. MEMORIES OF A HAUNTING
MEMORIES OF A HAUNTING
Olivia copes. She copes through painting and making chaotic experimental short films and dancing until she cries.
Dancing feels intimate. Dancing feels close to pleasure.
Dancing is as close as she can get to strangers.
When she goes out alone, she doesn't drink alcohol to numb herself, but she dances with an intensity that soaks her in sweat.
It's a theatrical ritual mixed with folly mixed with the occasional ass-shaking required to move with a song.
By the end of the night, she's a cloud of patchouli and lined with glimmering tears. When a stranger notices the tears and asks if she’s okay. She always says yes.
Yes, it’s just sweat.
Olivia sees a therapist through the community college and she talks to them about Isela and growing up as a child to strange parents.
She lies to the therapist in every session.
She figures it’s all a part of shedding her mother’s skin from her own.
According to her therapy sessions, Isela is dead, the old house burned down, and The Inflorescence was only a room where her imagination went so intensely wild, the hallucinations felt real.
They were forms of escapism she used to cope with the truths behind closed doors.
According to her therapy sessions, Olivia wanted nothing more than for her mother to love her.
This sounds like it could be true, but Olivia isn't sure anymore.
If she had the choice, she would not choose her mother in another lifetime. One lifetime was enough.
Olivia copes. She meditates. Or, she tries to meditate.
She asks Saint Michael for a sign that she's on the right path.
In her silence, her ears ring, her pulse is thunderous.
Her body vibrates. She pictures her skin coming undone like a falling piece of heavy cloth.
Her muscles are a dewy and pink translucent jellied texture.
Her heart is a pomegranate and cherry blossoms emerge at the crown of her head.
Her organs tremble and turn into magenta and white cosmos flowers and then jagged obsidian beneath her gelatinous form.
Olivia copes with numbing indifference. A perpetual void.
The insidious indifference her mother obviously felt for her growing up and the indifference Olivia feels when she knows a social interaction calls for a sympathetic response.
Perhaps, it was passed down. Olivia understands the concepts of love and empathy.
She pictures love as hues of cornflower blues and carnation pinks.
Empathy is electric orange infused with a constant soft hum.
She loves her sisters. She adores them, but she can't shake the feeling that she's doing it all wrong.
Olivia films herself every morning. It's a quick daily ritual.
She whispers a secret to the camera. About The Inflorescence.
About her mother. About the ways she feels in her body.
She mouths the words. She looks directly at the camera with her arms folded.
She watches herself to see if it stirs anything new within her.
It never does, but it's proof of being young, a little vain, and a little boring.
Olivia copes by loving herself. A skill she formed as a child like a shield. She loves herself in spite of and to spite her mother. She wonders if she will ever stop being haunted by Isela.
When Olivia dreams about The Inflorescence, she misses the house and the oaks and the wildflowers.
The house calls to her. There's a longing to have lived there as one of the creatures in her past lives or a child with a different set of circumstances.
It feels unfair. It feels like injustice.
Olivia knows she cries too much, but she doesn't know how else to cope with her memories.