PORTRAITS Nia Paz Our living room wall was an illusory display of our family. A stranger might have envied our mirage of happiness, equipped with smiles, baseball hats, and entwined fingers. I did not see these photos. I heard them.
“You are worth nothing.� His words stabbed the inside of my skull. Pain seeped in, infiltrating every corner of my being with his male superiority. His obsessive desire with me becoming his son instead of his weak, fragile daughter reinforced his displeasure. My mother shook her head, silently correcting his logic with whispered reassurances once he was out of earshot. The phrases assaulted me so often that believing them became easier than ignoring them. Until suddenly, there was silence. At 2:00 am, I woke up to the sound of a slammed door and a revving engine. I followed the muted cries of my mother until I found myself at her bed. She was lying limp under a blanket, which my hand hesitated to uncover. The light struck her face and revealed dark purple imprints of his fists. I held her as she cried. There is a gap on the living room wall where our family photos once stood. There was no time for replacing old frames with new images. New routines left our lonely camera
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on the top shelf, collecting dust. I was a toddler, and then an adult. He took my childhood in the car with him. Nights of muffled shouts behind closet doors turned into nights of noisy silence, accompanied by the faint sound of cartoons and the slush of macaroni. I didn’t mind my solitude; my mother needed to work longer hours to pay rent. Each night, I would wait for her to come home. Miniscule changes appeared in the details of her face. Gradually, the tears turned into sighs of relief, and finally a smile.
He was wrong. As time passed, my mother grew from a discarded shell of a woman into an entire ocean. Her tears amassed into waves, obliterating all obstacles in her path- or rather, our path. My mother, my sister, and I formed an unbreakable bond. Nights alone turned into nights of storytelling, reading myth after myth of the mighty heroine who saves the day. He strangled me with limitations and she deliberately untied them. She tended my wounds and mended my perception of women, ultimately forging me as an empowered heroine emerging from the depths of her shadow. Her strength gave me endless impulses of inspiration, until I burst. I snatched the dining chair and reached the top shelf, blowing off the dust from the camera. These family photos are limited, but I try to remake the time lost with portraits of my mother.