2023 Short Story & Essay Contest: Honorable Mention, High School Essay Contest
Nine
A new song started as we parked in front of the house. I turned up the volume and pleaded for “just one more.” Joe, my mom’s long-term boyfriend, groaned, leaving the car, the same one he had slammed my mother against the hood of in the National Cathedral parking lot just six months prior. But I didn’t know yet. I still idolized this man. My mom stayed with me and our voices entwined, singing Rachel Platten’s “Fight Song:” Like a small boat in the ocean / setting big waves into motion. Even as a little girl, I knew I had my own power.
Ten
“Just take the pill, mom,” my voice snapped. I held up the bottle. All I desperately wanted was for my mother to become better, like she was before. Joe didn’t leave a note, only a toothbrush on the sink. I remember begging her to say I love you because I couldn’t tell anymore, and when she repeated it, she sounded mechanical, forced, and her eyes looked vacant, like an imploding supernova light years away. She choked down the medicine. I went to bed uneasy. At 3 a.m., a firefighter shook my brother and me awake from our mattresses on the floor. A flashlight swept across us. He told me that my mom was going to the hospital, and that my grandma would be taking care of me for a little while. I wanted to wake up from this bad dream.
Twelve
Stacks of pink watercolor hearts, lice, and a physician’s note that confirmed her disability. That is what she brought back home from her third hospitalization for post-traumatic stress and clinical depression. The doctor told her that it would be easier for her to receive accommodations if there was visual representation of her disability. I think that it would be easier if she didn’t have a disability at all, so I refuse to show the letter at airports and festivals. I didn’t want special treatment or attention. I wanted to be normal.
Sixteen
“Pelvic fracture in three places,” my mom tells me over the phone, her voice breaking. “They say it will take a year.” Two weeks back, she lost her balance and fell. Now she sat in a wheelchair, unable to walk up the stairs of our house. In the airport, we skipped lines now that her disability was visible. At a college tour, though, I pushed her around in a wheelchair, navigating steep ramps on the inaccessible campus. By the time we rejoined the tour group, they had already moved on to the next stop. As she healed, I watched as she became just another normal person again, her disability invisible again. I promised to advocate for her in this world that was not built with accessibility in mind. So even though it’s corny, cheesy, a pop ballad cranked out by corporate, I am moved to tears and to action whenever I hear this is my fight song / take back my life song.
