This morning as I lay in bed, I thought idly of my dead daughter; recreating, in struggling flashes, the hard edge of her stomach from under her shirt, the filthy pooling blackness of her hair on my shoulders, her arms tangling like little branches as she rolled forward on her toes to beseech me. I thought of her cold lidded eyes and the bright obsidian within, of her screams of joy and laughter, of the faces she made when her shyness consumed her. My daughter was, for a time, everything to me, and this morning so she was again. I am alone. There is nothing I can do. My daughter is gone and I am helpless in my prayers.
My daughter, like so many others, never had any chance. She was thrust into a world of confusion and fear and foregone conclusions. Often when we spoke my daughter would ask me how such a world could even exist long enough for her to come into it, and for this I had no answer. All I could say was that she was singular in her power to destroy and overcome it. Her life was an impossibility. Her beauty, the most hideous loss of all, was that of the prisoner condemned.
My daughter was wise beyond her years. She understood everything. She saw through my lies for the truths they were. Her small, sweet voice in an instant could become a howling inferno, a universe of ripsaws and rats, before vanishing again into her dulcet, hidden smile. Within my daughter was a chorus of angels, which I and everyone else were powerless to contain.
Often, my daughter disappeared into herself, retreating from the harsh, ugly world into familiar, private comforts. Many, I reckon, were scarcely aware that she even existed, much less the multitudes within her, but she was at all times my most precious jewel. For weeks she would sit in utter silence
My daughter, for all her strengths, was marred by countless petty weaknesses which were wholly out of her control. Slowly, like rainwater through limestone, these weaknesses bored their way through her until there was only the ragged caricature left over. The first to fail her were her fingernails, with most ending up as trinkets in our mailbox. Then went her mouth, dissolving into split tongue and itchy teeth. Soon enough it all collapsed.- her knees crushed by anvils, her earlobes bulbous and fat, her eyelids peeling in round crescent sheets. Within days, it felt like, her body disappeared completely, leaving her mind to fend for itself among the wolves.
My daughter died at the time she was made to. Nothing I did could efface the overwhelming impossibility of her life. I begged for nothing: pleaded, on broken knees, for
I loved my daughter, urgently and foolishly, though I was never able to tell her so. In dreams I often come close to righting this wrong, but inevitably I am pulled back to miserable waking life, incomplete without her. I clench my eyes and try to picture her, but even there she is disappearing. Soon enough I will be gone and