IF I EVER LOSE MY MOUTH
Things that are red to me: the inside of a mouth, the number 9, and my mother. When I decided 9 was my mother, I was younger than that and sat at a plastic desk. I’d learned so much “girl,” in math class I imagined numbers were romantic with each other. 6 loved 7, 7 loved 8. I craved blood and God but settled for the desire to mate and birth babies. 6 was me, and 9 was my mother.
I didn’t know about the sex act. 6 was Britney Spears pink, nothing in her but lust and the shy slope of a neck. I hated math until my mom said, “I like numbers. I think they’re cute.” By the time my mother and I had the same voice, she’d turned to air, to kief, mandala, the Buddha smoking in bed.
My sister got her first period at 9, a year after she stopped wearing diapers. She’d bang her head, bite, bleed, leave scars on her temple, my mother and father’s hands, once a babysitter’s neck. She loved to swing, to balance on high beams, and to be naked. So my mother dressed her in overalls—harder to remove. She looked just like I would if I were older and heavy and had a bowl cut and a green bean stuck to my shirt. Of all the songs our mother sang to us, “Moonshadow” by Yusuf, Cat Stevens, was her favorite. She’d request it by name. MooShauw.
When I was 20, my mother read me a play she’d written about her pens. Each color ink a different character. The red pen had the most ink because it was least loved. The purple pen was running out of ink and about to die, and the red pen envied its love-death. Mom started crying as she read. She’s a good writer and not crazy. When my sister died, my mother wanted us to grieve as a family, but Dad and I were either bottled up or empty. I’m not sure which.
Once while meditating I found a skinny fish in my throat. I saw the maroon of my eyelids and between them an undulating line, propelled upward by light and breath. I bragged to the man who’s far away, “You have a dragon in your chest. Now I have a skinny fish.” Back when we were dating, whenever I cried he would tell me to meditate, so now I meditate daily out of spite. I make my hips heavy, sink into my root, imagining the mine shafts that snake beneath my hometown. Briefly consider getting a tattoo of Montana on my ass. I open my mouth slightly: at the throat, I’m pure as mama’s kief.
A week after I found the fish, Mom sent me a Youtube video about the chakras, and I learned about Kundalini swimming up to Shiva. “Kinda like my skinny fish,” I told the man. I’m a Pisces. He takes a long time to respond to my texts. “The throat chakra is the gateway to understanding, and the heart chakra opens you up to the world,” he said. “That’s why I define love as trying to fully understand an aspect of something.” I know that the root chakra, which grounds you to the earth, is red. We are white people and steal things we don’t fully understand. We’ve used drugs and don’t think we have to make sense anymore. I didn’t respond to his text, a gentle form of revenge.
On the phone with my parents, Mom says she finds mandalas extremely sexy, but maybe she’s the only one. “We should let you go. I’m making your father uncomfortable.” I think I understand what she means about mandalas: the roundness, the hot and cold colors, the patterns woven tightly, almost bursting. And probably something I don’t understand. Something about the grief, or the kief, or getting older, or being a separate person. In the video, Anodea Judith tells me a lotus is blooming from the top of my head, but her voice is so spandex blond that I don’t believe her.
My mother once told me I have two presences: one presence is quirky and sweet, like the actress Zooey Deschanel. The other (mostly when I wear red) is erotic. I think I’m turning into my mother—my 6 starting to flip into 9. But for now I’m just rocking on my back; I’m her mirror, reflecting red, the most violent color. I’m a very dangerous person.