by Sarp Sozdinler
It’s my duty as a mother to come up with words for him, words for feelings he can’t quite explain. Wholery is a noun I recently wrote in his notebook, something I defined as “becoming one with someone else,” a feeling that hasn’t left me since my pregnancy. In his world, each word can also mean something else depending on how it sounds. Coo? means “May I?” on a good day while coo with a downward inflection would mean “I can’t.” He can’t express “stop” because he doesn’t know how to stop. Bubbas is another word I devised after his first day of school, plural for bubba, a substitute for the scorn one feels toward an absent parent. Every time he feels sad, bub becomes bub-bub becomes bub-ish, sounding like pointy little rocks in the cave of his mouth. Kids his age are more prone to having not-feelings for their not-parents: not-rage and not-joy, all melding into one big nonentity in the slime of their minds. Today, the words I write for his preschool meetup—unwittery, boondoggle, kickaroo—sound like a recipe for an infantile disaster. They prompt him to become someone he’s not, a bully instead of the bullied. In the principal’s office, I find him scouring a dictionary, possibly searching for obscure words. When he notices me, his face scrambles as if I’m some new word he can’t define. I’m sorry, I want to say, my but my words feel oddly foreign on the back of my tongue. I'm sorry that I couldn’t find the right words when you needed them most. I'm sorry I had to lie my way out of most anything. I'm sorry I smoked in secret in my second trimester and poisoned the well of your water. I'm sorry that I scarfed down a whole watermelon once and imagined it was you. I'm sorry I refused to see you the entire first week you were born, when you were desperate for something, or someone, to latch on—a nipple, a mother, a home—craving wholery. I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry.
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Sarp Sozdinler is a writer from Amsterdam. His work has been published in Burial, Bruiser, X-R-A-Y, Hobart, Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Shenandoah, HAD, Maudlin House, and Pithead Chapel. He edits the online journal The Bulb Region.