Sunshine Daydream
by Tracie Adams
[this is the second in the three part series–
read A Life in Seasons from the beginning]
Sunshine Daydream
The child has become a woman, wild and overgrown like summer branches reaching for light, reaching for the mother vine. She lashes out, grabbing hold of anything, everything, nothing at all. Night after night, she searches for something to stop the throbbing in her chest. The men numb her pain. They are all the same, but she is different. They need her, at least for the moment, but she doesn’t need anyone or anything. She has discovered her superpower. It was still dark outside this morning when she collected her clothes from the floor and tiptoed away from another sleeping stranger. The deep breaths were helping the rush linger, so she could savor it for as long as possible. The high was even better than the cocaine she binged last night.
On the drive to her apartment, she sings along with the radio, speakers rumbling with the bass, and memories begin to rise with the sun, looming straight ahead with blinding light. Pressing the gas pedal with bare feet, she watches the world go by at eighty miles per hour, trees blurring into the sides of buildings and yellow cabs melting like butter. Everything is in motion. Gripping the steering wheel, she blinks away an image of her mother singing karaoke to an audience of disinterested drunks.
“Did you hear them laughing?” Her mother’s tears had left bare streaks through her impeccably applied makeup.
“They weren’t laughing at you, mom. They’re just drunk,” she had offered, trying to console her mother.
“You don’t think I know when I’m being mocked? Humiliated? You’re twelve. You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
Her mother had been wrong. She did know what she was talking about. Still, her mother’s accusations always cut deep. While her entire world had shifted like sand beneath her feet over the past decade, her mother refused to evolve. She didn’t see the need for it, especially when there was nothing in it for her. She turns up the volume and sings louder, drawing up breath from deep in her diaphragm.
When her stomach growls, she relishes the feeling of emptiness. Starving herself empowers her, assuring her she is good at something. The sun continues to climb high in the atmosphere, the earth tilting toward its warmth. But she clings to the lesser light that lives inside, the only thing she trusts. She doesn’t even try to bridle the energy anymore. She is in control, and it feels good.
After dark, she applies the red lipstick without looking in a mirror. Slipping bare feet into her favorite heels left by the door, she grabs keys from the cluttered coffee table. As she slips her phone into her purse, it buzzes. It’s her mother. The familiar ache tugs at her but she cannot bring herself to answer it. The road between them is littered with obstacles, words left unspoken too hard to hear. They try to meet in the middle, but words stick in their throats so they swallow them instead. There are hills too steep to climb in this kind of heat, pregnant pauses and breath held, silence hanging in the thick air.
She wants to love her mother and to be loved, but spaces fill with disappointments, disillusionment, delusions. She remembers the sound of her mother crying alone in her room every night, mumbling the same mantra of regret behind a closed door. As a child, she would stand outside that door night after night, her hand resting on the paneled wood, reaching for something she could not name. Sadness is a language they both understand but cannot speak.
She turned twenty-six this year, and now the panic attacks were coming at a steady pace. Her mother once asked her why. “Because of the trauma,” shesays. “What trauma,” her mother asks. The distance between them is measured in unfulfilled dreams and countless unforgiven sins. “It is just too far from you to me, me to you,” she whispers to the ringing phone.
As she steps out into the humid night air, she crushes the cigarette with a stiletto heel. She lifts her head toward stars partially covered by clouds, moving swiftly with the warm wind. She adjusts her skirt with one hand and flips her hair with the other. She would sing that song tonight, the one her mother taught her, the one that always got the crowd going. They would ask for one more, and she would give them what they wanted. The applause would linger while she walked out holding tight to the arm of another stranger with vodka on his breath.
It is the summer solstice. The longest day of the year.
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