isabella {d5/fin}

My mother spoke often of the days before, when she and my father passed time in a happy manner. They watched sunsets, told stories, and did almost every couple-cliché that’s ever been written down. I thought I wanted it, for a while, to love someone so much that every thought and hope was tied tightly to them. But this was before my mother ever finished the story—their story, and how it was nothing of what she wished for.

The first day that she agreed to tell me, she started with a forced chuckle and a downcast glance before stumbling through a sentence that threatened to split every crack in her heart of glass.

“Your father was never good with commitment. It was something I loved, at first, since I had always been one of plans and schedules and he lived on nothing but spontaneous whims and thoughts,” She had paused here, had watched for my gaze to meet her own before continuing, “you’re like him, in that way.”

I didn’t think that was much of a compliment, really.

But then again, my mother’s negative association with anything my father did bled through into every word she spoke. It was never hatred; never anger, but some sort of void, some sort of emptiness that never seems to fade. She told me of his walking out, of how his lack of commitment had gotten the best of his spontaneous nature.

“Don’t ever be like that, Izzy.”

Too late.

For I wanted nothing more than to be gone, to fade like a whisper into the morning wind and travel to a place unknown, on the whims of that morning breeze.

It runs in unknown blood, I suppose.

But I couldn’t bear that, not for the time she was asking. Asking a child to drop their curiosity was like asking an adult to not refill their glass. It simply wasn’t plausible. And though I promised to never ask, I never could quite drop it. So instead of asking with words that wouldn’t come I scrawled it upon pages of one of her journals, placing it back on the shelf every night before she made it to bed.

I checked it every morning too, just to see if she would reply, but months of this brought nothing new, the only thing that changed was the hand which wrote upon it. For the girl that had begun asking unanswered questions had bright eyes and tangled hair that couldn’t quite be tamed was no longer here, replaced by a girl who couldn’t bear to ask even the simplest questions without fear of opening up a wound.

"Mom, do you—"

“What is it, Izzy?”

“Nothing.”

I was hardly twelve when I learned that curiosity killed another part of me.

My mother wouldn’t admit it, not for anything in the world, but she was the one who engraved it into my being, who carved it upon my heart and mind and made sure that I wouldn’t forget it.

(“There’s nothing in this world that you need to see.”)

But my heart wasn’t tied to the same land, mind never content with the quiet of home ground. My father, he wandered, I suppose, but my mother never allowed me to leave the front yard. But there’s a world, there’s a further horizon and I wanted nothing more than to see it.

My mother wanted to see it too, at one point, and she said it herself in the words she wrote.

She said she wanted to see the world with him, to travel land and sea with no plans or itineraries to be had, and I suppose it was a love-struck heart or light soul that sparked that thought.

This was before she was left with an empty home and restless child, however.

My name is Izzy and I’m hardly eighteen. I’ve got aspiration and hopes tied by thoughts and dreams. My heart is gold and my frame stands tall, but among the best of these I’m not good at all. For my mother calls me foolish and scolds me times three, but within it all the regret lies on her sleeve. There’s hurt tied to the eyes that speak the same pain, for my father left her in the rain. Her blue eyes don’t show hope, not in the same way mine do, and while her brown hair strangles like a noose round her neck, mine tangles and falls like rope down my back. She told me that it’s my fault, but if we are the same, then it’s not only I who’s at blame.

I’m not tied to this ground in the same way as she, for I have no regrets—what else do I need?

The answer is this, for I need nothing less, for I’ve got the heart of a child and the mind to confess.

My mother does not love me, not since my father walked out, and she’s reminded each time she drinks from the fount.