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“What’s a fuck when what I want is love?”― Henry Miller
When I was a sophomore at university, I came home one day to find my mother irate. I walked into the kitchen innocently, only to be chastised for being ungrateful. It wasn’t the kind of commotion I wanted with my coffee, but something told me that morning my lunch and dinner would be cold and tasteless. Like my father, I kept quiet. But inside, I was sizzling. The pressure cooker inside was building up as my ears burned with accusations of not loving her and blasphemy. Ten minutes later, I was still clueless about what had triggered her anger.
In my head, I started to wander off into Dante’s Hell, scooping up anger with my hand and skipping through boils of bubbling lava. I had a beast within me, and my mother was tempting me to unleash the kraken. She always did. The Lord’s Prayer I learned in my childhood under the Church of England was pitted against the fiery inferno, offering me a sense of balance. It’s funny how your mind works in times of adversity.
It turned out my brother had found a poem I had written and shared it with my mother. The poem explicitly described how my parents and siblings veered off a cliff in a vehicle, depicting their demise with a voice that sounded authentic…
