Journal 2025

   You couldn’t tell what she does for a living by just looking at her face. Over the years, she went from a look of innocence, even naïve to motherly, although close up, she shows the wear and tear, especially around her mouth and deep in her eyes where a darkness lay. But her body betrays her, especially in a bathing suit, the parade of tattoos she’s acquired like a road map to where she’s been and what she’s done, breasts and arms marked with ink by an expert’s hand. She has a rose tattoo on her wrist and another on her hip, seven tattoos in total, each attained in a different place, signifying a career that has stretched from coast to coast. She’s always been this way, even with me during those early years, though now, she paints herself as a middle class housewife, dedicated to raising the child she sired with me. I rarely see the other side of her, the one she reserves for her clients, a regular cammelion, who changes her appearance at need. She needs me to...

When my mother became too mentally ill to care for me, my aunt, Alice, took over. She washed me; she sang songs to me, she tucked me into bed to sleep at night, and even when the thunder and lightning rocked the old house we lived in at the time. “It’s angels bowling,” she told me then, sitting on the edge of the bed as I shivered under the covers, knowing when she left I would pull them over my head again. But she insisted on staying a long time, and her sweet perfume filled the room with its lily fragrance, a scent that remained with me, even after I had grown. I still recall her gentle touch on my arm. She wore very little jewelry, just a thin gold chain that held a tiny gold heart, a gift from a boyfriend destined to become her husband and the father of her real children when they came. “Do you think about your mother?” she asked me during one of these visits, her brown eyes full of sincerity. “Yes,” I told her, uncertain exactly what she wanted me to say, smiling at my...