PAINT YOU BLUE

• Afnan Mohammad Suliman, Grade 11
• Short Story
• 2022

I hear the trauma crying within me, I suddenly feel the urge to run, go for a jog maybe desperate for anything to escape this simulation where my head eats me up and becomes my greatest enemy...

A DEMON!

These days I haven't been sleeping. Staying up all night and playing back myself leaving. I’ve been living alone in my apartment in Boston for the past 8 months. And I never knew I could feel that much guilt leaving on bad terms; no closure and I know I’m not any closer to it. I've grown apart from my mother. Her love is the only Hoax I believe in. But I always had questions for her after my dad's death.
Did her love affair maim her?
Did the illicit affair bruise paint her blue?
My mother drew stars around my father’s scars and now he’s forever bleeding. As I’m walking, I realize no amount of freedom will get me clean I’ve run away and tried to remove my mother’s existence from my brain, but I’ve still got my mother’s blood all over me.
It’s hard to be anywhere these days when I feel like an open wound, my mother marked me like a bloodstain, and I see her everywhere as every inch reminds me of her truths.
While I’m fighting my mother’s demons I feel like a rebel from a selfish mother and careless man’s careful daughter
They hate me being sad but that’s how I’ve grown to feel, sadness isn’t a bad thing that people fabricate to make it seem it’s my friend. A profound feeling that paints me blue.
I’m staring at the ceiling in the pitch-black darkness and there’s the same old empty feeling in my heart. I feel as though my mother stabbed my heart and twisted it with the knife, she led me to believe she was loving me with and cooking me dinner with, but little did I know she was sharpening it to break me. That mark will forever bruise me it will forever paint me blue. I can’t be here as I’m thinking to myself how I can remove this invisible string tying me and my mother together and the only thing that can destroy it is with the very same knife she used on me.
Knock knock
It’s my mother. The liar, cheater, and thief are standing on the outside door of my apartment. I knew this moment would arrive, this moment crawls my body knowing it will come and now it’s here. I dare to open the door. I see the look in her honey golden eyes turning into shattered glass, she’s broken. She’s blue. “Rose, I... I... I’m sorry,” my mother says. As the emotions in her eyes melt to her body. My mother drops on the floor like a crumbled-up piece of foil. I mumble “did I paint you blue?” My mother takes a deep breath as she hands me a thorn of roses and my body feels something it has never felt toward my mother... sympathy. My strong mother, my bruise, changed her broken face to pure disgust. I never turned the knife against my mother, I have always run until now she caught up to me. My past can never leave me. I wish my trauma can catch my fall as the coldness plunges into my stomach and paints me forever blue, like my father; dark, sad, abandoned, and dead.