Sight

The day that I grew my third eye, my mother cried. Now that's nothing unusual- my mother is always crying. About the rain, about the bird she hit on her way to work, about dad. But that day, I think that we both knew that something was different. Something had changed. It felt like there had been a great shifting in the Earth, the blood inside me pumped molten, my bones harden beneath my skin, and my skin… My skin became like steel, harder than the ornate crystals of a diamond, but just as beautiful.

She looked at me as if I were broken. Her eyes were wide and glassy, staring at the abnormality on my forehead, as if it were the strangest thing about me. Tears streaked down her cheeks as she sobbed. Audibly. Then she started to pray, gaze still locked on me, her voice loud yet quavering. She asked God to give her “strength.” She asked Him “why?” But I think she knew that no one was listening then. Her eyes were so wide, I swear that I could see myself reflected within them. Looking at her was like looking into a mirror.

These days, all of our mirrors are covered with sheets.

My mother doesn’t look at me anymore. This in itself, is also not usual. But her distance seems louder now. Louder than ever before. Sometimes, Before, she used to cup my face in her palms, calloused and sweet, and stare into my eyes. Then she would tell me how much I looked my father and would say nothing more. I had grown used to her temper, the way she would yell and cast blame, her words hot and scolding. But those endless hours of belittlement were always followed by moments of softness.

I had always cherished them, like ripe cherries exploding on the tongue. My mother was the kind of person that could be an absolute ray of light when she wanted to be. She could glow like the sun for you if she thought that you were worth it. But just as easily, she could be so bitterly cold.

There were days though, when she wouldn't speak to me at all, Before. Lapses of time in which the only sounds that drifted between us were the whir of the broken ceiling fan and the buzz of the television that was older than I was. Those were the days when I was being punished. As a child, my mother always used to tell me that I had to earn her words and whenever I did something wrong, she refused to speak to me for days.
Once, I fell out of a swing and broke my arm during a time when I was being punished. She didn't say anything to me. She didn't comfort me. I don't even remember going to the hospital. I just remember crying, hot, fat tears as jolts of pain shot through my body. It was a strange sensation being broken. Almost stranger than healing. I was six then.

Today, the silence feels nice. It doesn't affect me like it used to. I don't feel an absence when my mother refuses to acknowledge me, when she looks right through me. I think she knows that I'm not dependent on her anymore. I think that she's afraid of me. And I like it.

She can feel it, too- the new power that resides in my bones. Sometimes the air around me will go still and the clock will stop as time crawls to a stop. Sometimes doors will open for me. Sometimes birds will follow me home and sit on the rooftop at night. I can't explain it and I think that makes it worse for her.
I've always felt like I wasn't normal. There was the omnipresent feeling, this presence under my skin that writhed beneath the surface of my denial. It was this buzzing sensation under my skin, inside my bones, inside the very center of my soul. I've always felt the power growing inside of me, I just never knew what it was. I was never given the chance to explore it, to embrace it.
My mother always told me that that kind of power was evil. It was passed down through generations, from fathers to sons, from mothers to daughters. It was of the Devil, traitorous and deceptive. It was to be reviled, never embraced.
I always knew that she was wrong.

When I grew out my hair, she called me ugly. Held me down, took a scissors to it. She forced me to stare at myself in the mirror afterwards, stood over my shoulder and kept repeating the Lord’s Prayer. I wouldn't let myself cry. I wouldn't let myself be angry. I wouldn't give her even that.

Now, I'm not allowed to look at myself. But she doesn't know that I don't need a mirror to see anymore. I can see futures and pasts, deaths and births. The visions come in flashes, bits pieces of lives, excerpts of stories that aren't my own. But if I focus, I can see myself.

I've been having a reoccurring vision ever since I was gifted with Sight nearly three years ago, the day that the eye appeared. In this vision, I can see myself, grown and loved, surrounded by a family of my choosing. I can see bright eyes and open smiles. White teeth, crooked. I can see the city, shining like a jewel behind us, the sun setting the sky ablaze. I am wearing a dress, my hair is long, my fingernails are painted. My face is lit up by a dozen pink candles. The people are singing, I am laughing.
I can see a future where I am not alone.

I always dreamed of the day I turned eighteen. Eighteen meant freedom for everyone, but for me, it meant a freedom of a different kind. I would dream of a celebration so grand and warm that it would make up for every birthday I never got to celebrate.
My mother always said that it was a sin to celebrate birthdays, that being showered in gifts and food was gluttonous. That a life shouldn't be praised, but the God who made it. She never made me a cake, never bought me presents. Sometimes I would forget how old I was.

When I was growing, I never knew that other kids didn't live the way that I did. Other mothers weren't like mine. Other kids’ mothers tucked them into bed at night and held them through nightmares and took them out trick-or-treating.
I was always told that I was ungrateful whenever I would mention things of that nature. Then my mother’s eyes would well up with tears as she told me that she was only doing her best. She was doing her best and how dare I question it? How dare I ask for more?

She had given up so much for me, she would always say. She had sacrificed so much for me. She had experienced great loss and great pain to keep me alive and here I was, questioning her. Asking for better when she had already given me everything.
This was something she did often- manipulating me with her suffering. She felt things so deeply, so earnestly. I knew this because I was the same way. So she used this to her advantage, twisting my fat heart in her grip, bending my bones and my will until they broke.

When I was growing, I thought that bruises could only show up on your outsides. But my bruises had always lived under my skin.

I always liked to think that the universe is watching over me. That the man on the moon wasn't hovering with apathy as I was left to rot in my skin. I still like to think that Orion’s bow is guiding me onwards, towards a home of my own design.

I can see now that it is. Some outside force, be it a god or a devil, has been watching over me. And they have given me freedom in Sight. I can see a world where girls aren't imprisoned by their mothers or their bones. I can see this world beneath the backs of my eyelids, painted delicately and vividly. Too bright to be anything but real.

Something inside of me has always known that I would live to see this world. To truly see it, firsthand. The power buzzing under my skin hummed nightly and I could feel this world as it grew inside me, even now as it still grows around me. Even in those earliest days of suffering, I felt it. It lived in my bones, like a malignant tremor.

Today, I am eighteen. When the world wakes up, the sun snakes through the bars of my bedroom window. I have been awake for hours. I am surrounded by boxes. I pack them swiftly and tightly, trying to fit a life’s worth of hurt into the cardboard confines.
I seal them with clear packing tape, stack them on top of each other, carry them out the door and down the stairs. A girl waits for me in the driveway, brown eyes sparkling with urgency and love as she takes the boxes from me and loads them into the back of her truck. I do this until the room is empty. Until there is only one box left. I carry it tightly, hold it against my stomach as I walk down the stairs for the last time with careful, deliberate steps. I feel the floorboards creak defiantly under my feet, shifting with my weight.

I walk past the mirror hanging over the end table in the front hall. I pull the sheet from its edges, let it float to the floor. I stare into the surface, I stare at myself. For the first time in three years I look at myself, clearly. Not through a store window, or the back of a spoon. The reflection in not distorted or diluted. It is as clear as it has ever been.

Three eyes stare back at me, the third rests in the middle of my forehead, it is just slightly smaller than the other two, but it's the same shade of brown. It has the same long, curling lashes. My eyes are framed by long dark hair that falls in my face like a curtain.

My hair brushes over my bare shoulders, broad and wide and great. I am wearing a dress. It is yellow and bright and contrasts beautifully with my black skin. It is the color of sunflowers, a color that says “Look at me. See me.” Three years ago, I would've been afraid to wear a dress, especially one of this color. A lot has changed since then.

When I look into the mirror, I see my father’s square jaw, his wide nose and large lips. I see his kind eyes. I wonder if he were still alive if he would see me when he looked at me. Or if he would be like my mother who only ever saw right through me. I wonder if he would see me as his daughter. Or if he would insist that I was, and would only ever be, his son. I wonder if he's watching me now, from Heaven, or the moon. I wonder if he's proud.
When I look at myself, I also see my mother- her dark skin, the splash of freckles over the bridge of the nose, the full almond shape of her eyes. I see these things and more. I see everything she has given to me and everything she has stolen. I see a girl, desperate and wanting, but at peace with the violence because she knows that she is stronger than all of it. Because she knows that she never did anything to deserve it.

I pull my gaze away and look out the open door at the girl standing in the driveway, leaning against the side of her truck. She's smiling warmly as she takes in my staring. Her red lips curl around the end of her cigarette. I walk out the door to her, arms still curled around my box, grasping tightly to the remnants of what once was. The door slams shut loudly behind me on its own, rustling the skirt of my dress. There is no breeze. I walk to her, and she finishes her cigarette as she follows me around the side of the truck, she opens my door.

“You ready?” she murmurs softly, and I hesitate. I turn a take one last look at the house, expecting to feel some sense of sorrow or loss. But I only feel relief. My eyes- all three of them, fall on a dark figure, silhouetted behind white curtains in the upstairs hallway. She sees me watching her, watching me and bristles, walks away.

I nod and am rewarded with a kiss on the cheek. I'm smiling widely when the girls climbs into the truck and turns the key in the ignition. The engine roars to life, and she puts the truck into drive, reaches for my hand. Our fingers intertwine as the truck rumbles onto the road, headed towards the interstate.

My fingernails are painted blue, and hers orange. They clash perfectly as she glances over at me, her lips curving into a dimpled grin, crooked teeth on display. We are smiling because we know that things are different now. We are smiling because we know there is a future ahead of us. A future brighter than our collective pasts.

I'm staring at her while we drive, her eyes trained on the road, flicking over every so often to glance at me. Then she'll giggle, smile. I love the way she blushes. I love the way that every second with her feels new, as if we haven't spent the last five years together.

Her brown eyes sparkle in the sun, painted golden in the morning light. She sings softly along to the radio and I do, too, just to hear our voices rise and fall together. There's a kind of bliss in sitting in the cab of a truck with someone as the landscape melts away beneath you and your voices are cracking together, slightly off-key to a Top 40 hit.

I've never been one for singing, but she has such a beautiful voice. I always tell her that she has the kind of voice that could lure soldiers to their deaths and then she rolls her eyes because she's too humble for her own good- and also because she's 50% siren (on her mother’s side).

I used to hate my voice before she came along. I used to hate a lot of things about myself before her. But she's given me clarity and made me see things that not even a third eye could. When I look at her, I can't see the visions, past or future, because I am so utterly captivated by the present. I only hope she sees the same when she looks at me, despite the changes that have occurred in the previous months.

In the cab of that truck, we both feel a great shifting. We have talked about this moment for years, like prisoners writing escape plans on the walls of their cells. We had spent so many years, dreaming up better places to be then where we were. We met in the following months after my father’s death. I was in the city alone and trying to get lost. That was first day I had ever worn a dress in public and I had an overwhelming desire to just lose myself. I wanted to become one with the crowd, to become another blurred face in a sea of writhing, rushing bodies. I wanted the freedom of existing in anonymity, to exist without being seen.

But then she crashed into me in a clatter of sound and light, forcing me out into the open. Her face had been obscured by a large pile of cake boxes, with all exploded open on the pavement and covered us in globs of cake and frosting. It should’ve be embarrassing, upsetting even. But we looked at each other, hair smeared with frosting and bruises already forming on our knees and we laughed. We laughed for a good long while, the infectious, snorting kind of laughter that makes one's chest ache. I hadn’t laughed in months and near the end, I felt like a great pressure had been released.

Even then, she had forced me to be seen- and I liked it.

Once the chaos had subsided, we exchanged names and stories. We talked about why we were in the city as we picked clumps of frosting out of our hair. We conversed aimlessly, skipping the small talk completely. She did most of the talking as I sat, enamored. She glowed with a sharp kind of confidence, with a light that did not care if it blinded those around her. She had her edges, like I did, and she wore them proudly. Her shoulders were exposed in a blue sundress the color of the sky as were her legs, which were long and gangling. She was so unlike me, so open and unafraid.

Phone numbers were written sloppily on napkins that we exchanged with our goodbyes, both of us hoping that this wouldn't be the last. The universe seemed to finally spin in my favor the night she called me at one in the morning, as if she knew I wouldn't mind. After that, we talked every night. Exchanging our conquests and our demons. I told her about my father's death and the hole left by his absence. I told her about my mother and the way she used her silence like a double edged sword. I also told her about the bruises, the shame, the light and how it scared me. With each and every story, I gave her further proof of how odd I truly was.

But she didn't question any of it. Most of the time, she would listen in silence, not saying anything. Just hearing me. So when she spoke, I did the same

She told me about her parents, who had kicked her out the day she started wearing dresses and growing out her hair. She told me about the city and how it had enveloped her in its warm embrace. She told me of the patchwork quilt of the family she had made for herself, and the joy she felt in knowing that she had chosen them. She also told me that the light scared her, too. Even now. But she pretended like it didn't. She wore her fear underneath the armor of a smile. I wore mine on my sleeve. It didn’t take me long to realize that she was odd too, she just wore her oddness in different ways.

Back in the present, the years flash through both of our minds, blurring like the houses through the truck windows. We share them in silence, our gazes jumping back and forth from the sunrise to each other. We are acutely aware of all the work that had to be done to get here. We share that burden- the tears, the sleepless nights, the aching. We grew together, like vines intertwining our sorrows and our joys. Our futures are now intertwined into one, and it blazes brilliantly in the rising sun. The light washes over us as we sit still in the cab while the truck hurtles through the morning. It is blinding but I am no longer afraid.

When she smiles at me, I can seen her features sparkle in that bright light. She is golden and radiant and she looks at me like I am the world. There is a quiet sort of fearlessness in the gesture, as she squeezes my hand. It speaks of the battles we have yet to fight, of the prying questions and lingering eyes that think themselves more important than our safety. There is fear and risk in being seen- but we are no longer afraid to take it. And we're going to do it together.

We don't look back once as we drive forward, towards the city.