As I have grown closer to my mother, we have these fleeting, intense, packed-with-emotions conversations sometimes. It is so deep and one with the soul that it almost makes me nostalgic about a connection I never thought I hoped for. But almost every conversation is also followed by a nagging sadness because almost every conversation is about the familial adversities that we both are stuck in. The empathy is underlayer with the longing for a conversation about a moment of happiness that feels elusive to the bones. Every talk is an act of writing a sad poem on a dry night of loo. Every exchange feels like staring at own's wretched existence in the mirror. Every story of the past shared liquifies my insides. Curdles my gut. And, I can't help but shake one constant thought. The thought of living with these experiences for the rest of my life. Stuck to my skin like the sweat in the desert afternoon. Embedded in every benign act of randomly eating a bucket of ice cream in the middle of a lonely night. And yet, there’s a strange warmth in it. A bittersweetness that swells and contracts in my chest, like a storm that never fully breaks. It’s a warmth that lingers long after the conversation is over, like the trace of a smile you’re not sure you saw, but you feel it in the air. It’s as if we’ve both unlocked a door to a place we never thought we could reach, a place where pain and tenderness intertwine. Where silence is a soft hum, the only sound that resonates when the words fall away.
But then—always then—there’s the guilt, too. Guilt for even daring to feel anything close to peace in the same breath as the ache. Guilt for wishing, in some quiet corner of my mind, that the pain could be less. That we could just talk about anything else. But it is, and it isn’t, that simple. Each word spoken feels like it’s steeped in the years we both carry, wrapped tightly around our ribs, squeezing us from the inside. Each silence, too, is like a stretched thread of memory that won’t snap. And I wonder, sometimes, whether the weight will ever stop pressing on us, or if it’s simply become a part of us, like a shadow.
I catch myself wanting to say something comforting, something that will dissolve the tension in the room. But what words are there? What words exist to undo a lifetime of bruises that run deeper than skin? What soft promises can replace the unspoken fears that tether us together, even as we try to walk in opposite directions? Every conversation with her feels like a tug of war-between the present and the past. And I feel the pull. Oh, how I feel the pull.
But it’s the waiting, isn’t it? The waiting that gnaws. The waiting for some definitive moment when the storm breaks, when the clarity we crave lands like a rainstorm that washes the dust away. But it never does. So, we keep dancing with the storm. We move through the chaos. And we are the storm. I think about it—about the incessant thirst for something we can’t quite name. Maybe that’s it. The words never come because there’s no language for the longing to break free, to just once exist in a moment untouched by all that was before, by all that drips from the walls of our memories.
Instead, we speak, again and again, of the same old things. And each time, it’s like trying to catch the wind in my hands—slipping through, shifting with the seasons, always just out of reach.
There is a force. A force that has no name, but it is. It’s the thing that winds itself into the very fabric of every conversation, every glance shared, every quiet moment between us. It’s a cold current that runs through the veins of our shared history, like a curse that was passed down, unbidden and unwelcome. It has shaped our minds, our hearts, and our movements before we even understood what it was. And when I look at my mother, I do not simply see the woman who gave birth to me. No. She sees the extension of that force—woven into the lines of my mother’s face, pressed deep into her tired shoulders, sewn into the sorrowful arch of her hands. It’s a genetic inheritance. A chromosome etched with scars of a life lived under something: something larger, something oppressive, something that has crushed womanhood into a form so unrecognizable that even she no longer knows what it is to be her—the her that was once unburdened, free of a history that collapsed on itself.
And I, oh, how I long to see the woman—the woman—that my mother could have been, could have still been, if not for the weight of the world that was handed down to her, piece by piece until there was nothing left but the hollow shell of a woman. I wonder if my mother ever knew what it was like to laugh without caution, to love without the worry of breaking, to be soft without the fear of being broken. But those are questions that are always too much. Those are questions that cannot be asked, because who would answer them? Who would dare to speak of a womanhood that was forcibly twisted, torn apart, and remade into something survivalist—something that could only exist through sacrifice and silence?
I try. I try to find even the slightest trace of it—my mother’s womanhood—as if it were a secret hidden beneath the surface of a story never fully told. I look for cracks in the armour of my mother’s exterior, hoping that the essence of her—the one that was never allowed to blossom—would somehow slip through like water trickling through the tiniest fissure in a dam. I want to catch a glimpse of it. Just once. To feel the pulse of womanhood that is hers too, buried somewhere deep within my dear mother.
But the cracks are few, and those that do appear are thin and fragile, fading almost as soon as they appear. I chase them, hands trembling, desperate to catch something—anything—that will prove that my mother’s womanhood still exists somewhere inside her. Maybe in the way she hums while commanding, in the way, her eyes soften when they talk of their lost loved ones, or perhaps in the brief moments when she forgets to hide her tears. I hope that if I hold on long enough, I can peel back the layers of resignation and see it—just for a fleeting second. But what I see instead is a woman who no longer knows how to be anything other than what life has made her.
And so I fight it. I fight the thought. The thought of becoming her mother. The thought of inheriting the very same fate—the same shadow that hovers over our lives like a distant storm. I try not to think of it, but the pull is always there. I am always one breath away from it, one step from falling into that same cycle of survival, of becoming a woman who is nothing more than a reflection of what has been done to her, who is nothing more than a version of what she was told to be, and nothing else.
And yet—there is a relationship. A refusal to be shaped by the same hands that shaped my mother. But the fear is there, too, gnawing at me, making me wonder if all my attempts to break free will only result in me becoming the very thing I dread. It’s a haunting, and it will not let me go.
Nights like tonight are when the weight of it all becomes so heavy, so palpable, that the air itself feels thick with the tension of unspoken things. I lie awake, the moonlight spilling through the window, but the shadows still stretch long and narrow across my thoughts. I wonder—sometimes desperately—whether there is a place where the echoes of my mother’s life will fade, where I will not always hear the whisper of that same cold current running through my veins, always reminding me that the past is never truly past. I wonder if there’s a way to sever it—to cut the thread that binds me to a history she can neither escape nor fully embrace.
And yet, there is no escaping it. No severing the cord, because it exists in my skin, my bones, my breath. It exists in the subtle ways I hold my hands, the way my voice quivers when I speak of things I cannot forget, the way I stiffen when the world presses too hard. My mother’s history is my history now, inextricable, woven into the very fabric of my being, like an ancient song that I was born knowing the words to, even though I never asked to learn them. And so, there are moments, too, when I am not fighting against it—when she is not running—but instead, I am simply sitting in it. Silent, still, like the calm before a storm that never fully breaks.
There are days when the weight of that inheritance feels like a blanket that has been folded too tightly, too many times until it is impossible to shake it free. But then, there are the moments in between—the flickers of something soft, something tender—that remind her that she is not simply defined by the past. There are the cracks that reveal something else, something deeper than the scars of survival. There are the glimmers of light in my mother’s eyes when she speaks and the days before all the sorrow before the world had taken what it could and left them both with what remained. There is the warmth of her hand on my arm when the words fail us both, and we simply sit together in silence, not because we have nothing to say but because there is nothing more to be said. And in that silence, there is a tenderness, a recognition of shared grief, of something that can never be untangled from the knots of their lives.
And in those moments, I allow myself to soften just a little. To stop fighting for a future that doesn’t bear the same weight. To breathe, just for a moment, in the space between our shared silences. I let myself feel it—the warmth, the tenderness, the connection that exists between us, even when the storm is raging. For all the heaviness of our history, there is something undeniably real in this bond we share. Something fragile and beautiful, like the way a broken flower still manages to bloom.
But even as I allow myself this brief release, I know that the storm is never far behind. The weight of my mother’s life, my own inherited burdens, will sit there, just beneath the surface, like a tide that is constantly pulling at her. It will always tug at my edges, shape my thoughts, and seep into my dreams. And yet, I know—somewhere deep inside—that there is strength in this, too. Strength in the knowing that I carry both the pain and the possibility of something more, something beyond the confines of the past. There is strength in surviving, in standing firm against the pull of history, even if it feels like a losing battle some days.
Because there is something within me that refuses to be extinguished. Some stubborn flicker of hope, of defiance, that whispers even when everything else is quiet: you are not your mother. You are not just the sum of all the wounds that came before you. You are more than this.
But then, the pull comes again. The pull of that force. The pull of my mother’s history, my mother’s pain, my mother’s unspoken stories. The pull of becoming the woman who has survived everything, who has lived under the weight of the world’s cruelty and kept going. The pull of becoming the woman who holds it all inside, who carries the scars of every battle fought and lost, but still stands—still stands, even when everything else falls away.
I see it sometimes, in the curve of my own reflection. I see the trace of it in the way my fingers curl around the edges of my mother’s hand, the way her eyes flicker with a sadness I cannot name. I feels it, too, in the way my own shoulders have begun to curve under the weight of things I was never meant to carry. And I wonder, as I stares into the mirror of her own existence, whether this is my fate—to be forever caught between the echoes of the past and the desperate desire to escape it. To be forever searching for something that is both mine and not mine—something that I long to touch, to understand, to claim as my own.
But there is also something else—a quiet resilience, a soft, unwavering light—that refuses to be drowned by the weight of history. Something that whispers, even when everything else is heavy, that the storm will pass, even if it never fully breaks. Even if the words never come. Even if the past never lets go. You are still here.
And so, the dance continues. The storm swells, recedes, and swells again. I am caught between the past and the present, between the woman my mother was and the woman I am becoming. She is both at once—torn, pulled, stretched across time and space. But in my chest, there is a small, stubborn beat of something more—a reminder that even in the darkest of storms, there is always something worth holding on to. Even if that something is just the quiet belief that one day, the storm will finally, somehow, break.
And when it does, I will be there. I will be standing—undone, maybe, but also whole in a way that is my own.
On nights like tonight (and the past few nights passed), when the room is thick with the smell of aging walls and the soft hum of the world outside, I lie beside her mother, both of us caught in the stillness of a moment we don’t dare break. The air is heavy, like it knows something that neither of us can name. My eyes trace the outline of my mother’s face in the half-light, the way the lines have deepened over time, carved into her skin by years of carrying burdens no one should have to bear. And in those moments, in the weight of her gaze, the force—the unnamed force—seems to pulse, like a shadow cast long before their time.
I can feel it in the silence between them, like the ghost of a conversation that never fully formed. It wraps around us both, thickening the space until it’s almost suffocating, as if the past is pulling at them from all sides, refusing to let go. I try to breathe through it, but the weight of it—the inherited weight—presses against my ribs. It’s there, lodged in the creases of my chest, the way my mother’s exhaustion is so clearly her own now. The way the longing for something—anything—more, something other than this, grows with each passing night.
And I wish, then. I wish with a desperation that rattles my bones, that some tide would come—some great, merciless wave that would crash down on us both, sweeping away all the pain, all the history, all the things that bind us so tightly to each other. I wish for the force to be undone, for the unspoken bond to unravel, to dissolve into the night like sand slipping between fingers. I wish for an end. An end to the weight, to the heavy silence that we have both carried so long, the unbroken chain of survival and sacrifice that has kept us locked in this shared grief.
What would it be like to finally breathe free of this? To feel the warmth of the sun without the shadow of the past creeping over it? To live in a world where the past no longer demands so much of them—where the force does not wind its way into their every word, every glance, every touch?
But there is no tide, no great wave that will sweep it all away. I know that as soon as the thought forms, the impossible nature of it settles over me like a shroud. No tide will come to erase the weight. No wave will cleanse them of what has been handed down, generation to generation. They are bound to it, always.
And yet, there are nights like tonight when the longing for that impossible freedom is so fierce it burns—when I lie here beside my mother, not daring to speak, not daring to disturb the fragile quiet between us, and I ache for a life for me and my mother untouched by the force that binds us both. I ache for a future that isn’t a continuation of the past, for a world where I do not have to carry this same burden, the same history. But even as the ache swells within my chest, I knows that the past cannot be undone. The force cannot be undone.
It is a tide, in a way, but one that pulls us both under. One that keeps them from ever truly breathing free. And in that quiet, as the night stretches on, I lie there beside my mother who is softly snoring, feeling her exhaustion, the weight of it all pressing against my chest, the way the past is never far, always so close. And I wonder, just for a moment, if this is what it means to be tethered to something larger than yourself, something that stretches back through time, binding you to it in ways you cannot escape.
The force is not just a shadow, not just an inheritance. It is a stronghold—a prison built into the very bones of who we are. And on some nights like tonight, as I lie beside my mother, I feel the walls closing in, and I wish—just once—that it could all stop. That the weight could be lifted, even for a moment. That we could stand in the quiet, not as survivors of what has been done to them, but as women, as people, untethered from the past.
But there is no escape. There is no breaking the cycle. The force is too deeply embedded, too entrenched in the soil of their shared existence. And yet, even in the face of that, I keeps breathing, keep fighting, keep hoping that one day—maybe one day—it will be different. That the storm will pass. That the unspoken weight will be lifted, if only for a brief moment, so that they can feel the sun on their faces without the shadow of what has come before.
But tonight is not that night. Tonight, the force presses down on us both, and we lie here together, bound by the silence, the weight, and the yearning for something more that neither of us knows how to name. And in the quiet, I am left with the single, relentless thought: Will it ever end?
But even in that thought, there is a flicker. A faint, stubborn hope that refuses to go out.
But hope is an elusive evil, a trickster that dances just out of reach, teasing me with promises it cannot keep. It feasts on the wretchedness of our mother-daughter dance, gnawing at the edges of our connection, as if it were something to be grasped, something worth chasing. But the more I reach for it, the more it slips away, like sand caught between trembling fingers. It is not the kind of hope that heals or redeems—it is a shadow, an illusion that feeds off our shared suffering, luring us both into a cycle of longing for something that cannot exist. Not in this world. Not in the confines of this life that they are bound to, this life shaped and twisted by the hands of a patriarchal system that has never allowed us to simply be.
For in this system, hope is not a gift—it is a weapon. A tool of manipulation, wielded by the outside world, the masculinistic forces that shape everything from our identities to our realities. Hope tells us, “You can be more. You can rise above. You can transcend.” But these are lies. Hope whispers that freedom is possible, that we can one day escape the weight of our inherited history, escape the clutches of the force that defines our relationship. But in the end, it is only a mirage, a false promise that leaves us empty. The system that birthed us, that shaped us, that has taught us the art of survival in silence, does not offer hope. It offers compliance. It offers endurance, as though endurance were the greatest form of victory.
I see this, even in the quiet moments of connection with my mother. Hope, in its purest form, is the ultimate form of betrayal for women like us. For it teaches us to keep longing, to keep wishing, to keep fighting for a world that will never be ours. A world built on the backs of women like my mother, like me—women who have been reduced to nothing more than vessels of survival, vessels that carry the weight of the world on their shoulders, without ever being allowed to let it down.
The force that binds us, the one that has shaped our lives and our relationship, is no accident. It is the byproduct of a world that has systematically stolen from us—not just our bodies, but our stories, our futures, our right to exist without the burden of the past. And in that world, hope is merely a tool used to keep us shackled, to make us believe that something better is coming, that the tides will change, that there will be light after the storm.
But every time I dare to hope, I feel the weight of that truth pressing on my chest like a hand that will not lift. I feel my mother’s history coil around my own—every step my mother took in her shoes now feels like my own, every ache, every loss, every piece of my womanhood torn away to fit into a mold that was never meant to hold me. Hope, then, becomes a cruel reminder of what we can never have. It is a yearning for a future that the world will never grant us.
And yet, there are moments—those fragile, fleeting moments—when hope creeps back in. Like a soft breath against the skin, a whisper of a promise that maybe, just maybe, they are wrong. That maybe the world will change. That maybe I will not carry the same weight, will not be bound in the same ways. Maybe—just maybe—there could be a place for me, for my mother, outside the prison of this society. But I know better now. I know the game. I know that hope is not a ladder out of this pit—it is the very thing that keeps me falling deeper.
For the patriarchal world we live in will not release us. It does not want us to rise, to stand in our womanhood unapologetically. It only wants us to bend, to bow, to endure. And so, hope becomes a tool of compliance. A whisper that tells us that if we just try harder, if we hold on just a little longer, then we will be free. But I know better. There is no freedom in hope. There is only the weight of the chains that it keeps hidden in its promises.
The force that binds us will not be undone by a dream of something better. It will not be swayed by desire or longing. It is the product of generations of women who have been forced to bend to the will of the world, who have been conditioned to survive without ever being allowed to live.
And still, I lie beside my mother, the force pressing against my chest, the weight of the past always there, always close. And in that moment, there is no hope. Only the pull of a reality that cannot be escaped. Only the realization that we are both part of a machine, a system that is too large to defeat, too entrenched to dismantle. But even as the realization settles in, there is something else—something that stirs deep within me.
It is not hope, but something else—something that cannot be named. A quiet, soft, blurry fire, a defiance that burns even in the face of all the forces stacked against them. It is the last piece of our womanhood, the last piece of ourselves that the world has not yet stolen. And though it may not change anything in the world, it is enough. Enough to stand here, beside my mother, in the quiet, and know that we are still here.
Still alive. Still fighting, even if we are not yet free.
And perhaps that is the one truth the system, the force cannot take from us: the persistence of our existence, in spite of everything, is our resistance.
- Oizys.
P.S. - I know this entry is ridiculously long and intellectually redundant. The night is long too, and it won’t pass. So, I did not stop until my eyes dried up, and until my bile rose, and until the hands gave up.
