Chapter 1
The kitchen clock ticks out a heavy rhythm in the gloom,
The scent of funeral lilies lingers in the hallway room.
I watched my father’s ashes drift into the ocean spray,
And stood before a grandmother’s cold corpse the other day.
Inside the funeral home, the quiet marble floors were chill,
The smell of polished wood was sharp, the air was dead and still.
My grief is like a heavy fog that makes the daylight blur,
And yet my empty, aching arms are reaching out for her.
For my own flesh and blood, who spins inside a different storm,
A fragile, shaking girl I used to cradle and keep warm.
Her mind is like a static screen, a lightning-fast machine,
The loudest, most chaotic race that I have ever seen.
The ADHD pulls her thoughts in fifty ways at once,
While anxiety locks her in place for painful, silent months.
She cannot anchor down her soul, she flies apart like glass,
And tries to find a way to silence the panic with a blade.
The pain is evident from the scars and fresh cuts she has made,
A desperate cry for quietness behind a locked oak door.
She is overwhelmed by siblings, by their noise and constant packing,
The smell of cardboard boxes and the tape they keep unpacking.
When the double losses struck us down, I drifted far out into space,
Leaving a cold and distant hollow where she needed a soft embrace.
Left alone amidst the family chaos, drowning in my heavy shade,
She slipped into the lonely dark where family bonds began to fade.
My phone lit up at midnight with her static, frantic breath,
A long-distance demand that felt as desperate as death.
She didn’t beg or ask me nice, she screamed into my ear:
“Give me the knife, just bring it now, it’s mine, do you hear?!”
I felt my conscience splinter as her screaming filled my head:
Should I submit to give her peace, or offer rules instead?
I told her I was terrified to yield a sharpened tool,
That she would use to cut herself beneath her panic’s rule.
To hear my own child order harm, to force myself to say
A shattering, protective “no” and lock the steel away—
That memory is an open wound, a sharp and jagged dart,
That permanently severed something deep inside my heart.
The therapy has yielded naught, the doctors fail to heal,
The clinic walls cannot undo the agony she feels.
The illness has mutated now to anger, cold and blind,
A poisoned cloak of biting words that targets all mankind.
She looks at everyone she loved with bitter, burning spite,
Destroying bonds with siblings through a never-ending fight.
The brother she once laughed with cannot bear her volatile fury,
As she condemns her family like a hanging judge and jury.
And as a mother, I am plagued by terrors of tomorrow:
Will these siblings ever reconcile beyond this wreckage and this sorrow?
If I should die and leave them here, will hatred close the door,
And leave them severed, fractured souls who speak to them no more?
Yet I remain the central mark, the shield where arrows fall,
Receiving all the concentrated hatred of it all.
I stand outside her threshold, feeling paralyzed and small,
The paint is peeling beneath my hand upon this bedroom wall.
No mother’s manual explains the geography of scars,
Or how to guide a drowning child beneath the falling stars.
In my own deep exhaustion, I have fumbled and withdrew,
And let a bitter silence grow between the things we knew.
The cold estrangement stretched the miles and froze our regular speech,
Until the baby that I bore was entirely out of reach.
I knock upon her wood tonight, the grain is rough and near,
I beg to hold her shivering hand, to whisper through her fear.
I want to knit the fabric back, to heal the broken year,
To sit together in the dark and wipe away her tear.
But through the door, her voice is sharp, a barrier of stone,
She tells me it is far too late, and begs to be alone.
She will not let me enter in, she guards her private pain,
While I am standing helpless in the freezing winter rain.
The deadbolt clicks—the final lock—the darkness swallows light,
A sudden, breathless panic grips the suffocating night.
She seals the world completely out, she cuts the final thread,
And I am paralyzed by ghosts and unmapped roads ahead.
I hear the ticking clock accelerate—a ticking time-bomb sound—
What catastrophic choices will she bury in the ground?
I see her slash at every friend, I see her peers retreat,
Unwilling to endure the volatile burns of her defeat.
How will she ever hold a job or make a household stand,
When adulthood approaches like a cruel, invading land?
Her future is a pitch-black cliff, a steep and jagged track,
And terror chokes my throat because I cannot pull her back.
