Page 140 of Under the Waves

Poppy Wells

Ipicked up the small, cream-colored letter and placed it in the trash like clockwork. Every week for the past month, they got delivered by the same mailman who left them on our porch step, unknowing of the destruction that lay inside them. The words crafted from the callused hands of a man who cursed me with a pair of forest green eyes that mirrored his own.

I never read them.

There was nothing inside those letters that could change the way I felt.

Nothing that could change the way he raised me.

The fear.

Thedisappointment.

Any of it.

I wanted no part of his games.

He’d gone over half a century without thinkingtwice about the daughter he’d left behind, and no amount ofI’m sorry’s scribbled on a piece of paper could erase that. No letter could make up for the time he threw away. And honestly? I didn’t want it to. There was no room for his apologies in my saddened, pathetic life. I was already at a breaking point, and I wouldn’t let him be the one to push me off the edge.

“What was that, Poppy?” The slurred words of my mother made their way across the kitchen tiles to where I stood, towering over the trash, trapped by time.

“Oh, it was nothing,” I shrugged, closing the cabinet door that covered the trash can under the sink. “Nothing at all.”

Because itwasnothing.

Hewas nothing.

“Whatever,” she coughed, slumbering back into her room.

That familiar door slam still had the power to make me flinch, even now.

I didn’t know why I wasn’t used to it by now.

You’d think I would be.

But I wasn’t.

Maybe I did still hold some desperate inch of hope that, one day, it could be different–that one day, she wouldn’t slam that door, placing that all too familiar barricade between us.

That one day, she might chooseme.

Chooseusover the memories of who we used to be.

I didn’t know why that sliver of hope refused to unbind itself from me. It was like the child in me refused to give up on those dreams I had now forgotten.

The little girl who collected seashells.

Painted and sketched to her heart’s content.

There was magic in her world.

Bright and blinding.

But that little girl grew up,raised in a world of little light.

I stared at that door for a long time after it closed, holding my breath like I used to hold onto the promises she made me. In another lifetime, maybe we could’ve been happy together in the way mothers and daughters should be. Maybe my father could’ve been loved in the way he needed to be growing up so I wouldn’t have to pay the debt that was never mine to owe.

Broken people, break people.