I told my Mum yesterday that when my own children grew up and if I had a chance, I would try to change my job, my dwelling place, maybe my country, my everything just not to, you know, not to sit on the butt the entire life. She said it was only dreams for her. Anyway, I know that even if she had such possibility she wouldn’t do all that. She’d like, but wouldn’t do. I hope I’ll have enough will.

Guess what I am reading now. D’you remember the film ‘Chocolate’? Well, I’m reading ‘Chocolat’ by Joanne Harris. Ha-ha, envy me, miserable people!) You know, it leaves a completely different impression from that the film does. The film is so cute and tasty and happy. The book is so much tough, fighting and upholding and reflectable-on and touching and loving. It’s worth reading at least for the sake of realizing Vienna’s love for her daughter.

`What would I do without you?’

Behind the counter I clench my fist in silent rage. I know that look – fear, guilt, covetousness – I know it well. It is the look on my mother's face the night of the Black Man. His words – What would I do without you? – are the words she whispered to me all through that miserable night. As I glance into my mirror last thing in the evening, as I awake with the growing fear – knowledge, certainty – that my own daughter is slipping away from me, that I am losing her, that I will lose her if I do not find The Place… it is the look on my own.

I felt a sudden pang for my daughter, surrounding herself with invisible friends to people the spaces around her. Selfish, to imagine that a mother could fill that space completely. Selfish and blind.

Her tone was strangely adult, strangely weary as she turned away. Tears swelled her eyelids, but she made no move to come to me for comfort. With a sudden overwhelming clarity I saw her then, the child, the adolescent, the adult, the stranger she would one day become, and I almost cried out in loss and terror, as if our positions had somehow been reversed, she the adult, I the child.

Please! What would I do without you? But I let her go without a word, aching to hold her but too aware of the wall of privacy slamming down between us. Children are born wild, I know. The best I can hope for is a little tenderness, a seeming docility. Beneath the surface the wildness remains, stark, savage and alien.


I feel like being a bit better daughter.