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[somewhere, deep inside of candide, there was a tenderness. she just found it hard to control.]
she rose in the morning and examined herself in the mirror, often reminded of her mother screaming the horrors of gray skin and wide hips with matching gray skin and wide hips herself. self-loathing was a common denominator in the women of her family, and she ran her slender fingers under her eyes as she noticed that she had yet to break the cycle.
her monitor lizard scuttled at her feet. she watched it, a green blob in her blurry vision. she could picture its definition in the absence of her eyesight: the deliberate nature of the creature's slow steps, the beady eyes looking up at her waiting for feeding. she almost smiled to herself, but the movement of a hand through her mussed hair startled the lizard and it scurried off. she heard the nails on her hardwood and almost let tears well in her eyes.
[candide's life was a montage of almosts. when she almost wasn't conceived because her parents were almost too lazy. when she almost wasn't born because of a bout of preeclampsia her mother had during the pregnancy. when she almost broke her neck falling off her bike in elementary school.]
setting out her clothes for the day, she heard joan's shower start across the hall. she stared at a piece of lint on her suit pants and imagined the smile on joan's face and the hum leaving her throat in the shower.
[when she almost dated her high school crush, but he ended up dating her best friend instead. when she almost got pregnant with his child in college, and cried on the floor of her dorm bathroom when she saw the single line staring at her like it was mocking her for failing. when she almost dropped out of college from the shame alone of being totally miserable and incapable of the one thing her mother wanted from her: a child.]
[in most ways, joan was almost like a daughter for her. they lived under the same roof, shared the same dining table and tacky wallpaper. joan shut herself in her room or left with friends instead of spending time with candide, just like she did with her mother at that age. candide got to tell joan that she wouldn't be home for the night or the weekend for work and toss her money for food, just like her mother used to do to her. candide went to bed with the sound of her snakes hissing softly and joan pacing in her room across the hall, and occasionally wondered how joan slept hearing the clacking of lizard nails or hissing of snake tongues across the hall from her room.]
candide's hand turned the knob of her shower as she heard joan's boots down the stairs towards the front door. a cockroach pressed its head against the glass of its container in the bathroom reminding candide of feeding. she let the water run until it was hot while she carried the container out to her bedroom and watched the monitor lizard push itself towards her with a velocity and intensity that made candide feel like she was loved.
[joan was almost her daughter, but not completely. candide did not watch joan grow up, did not hold her hand and wipe her tears the first time she fell down as a toddler. she did not spend nights sitting at her child-sized bed to lull her to bed with back scratches and soft words. she did not watch her complete preschool, or elementary, or junior high. joan was birthed to candide when a hair dryer pulled the chill of 20 years from her bare shoulders and her water cocoon slid to the ground and collected with the water cocoons of all of her friends. joan was learning and growing, but two decades behind. the first night that joan was unfrozen, candide put her ear to the wall to hear joan's overwhelmed sobs. candide wanted to come to her door and hug her and comfort her, but she worried that she wouldn't know how to.]
[she was worried that she would never be a mother. she knew that being a mother was not about giving birth or even being physically there for her child, and yet, that was what being a mother was to her. her tears on her dorm bathroom floor played in her mind every night that she let joan sit in her room by herself. perhaps if she had just given birth to joan, they would be closer. she would perhaps have been given the motherly instincts she was always promised if her body would just recognize joan as her offspring.]
candide recognized that joan just wanted to be loved by her. in many ways, candide felt the same way about joan. candide's lizards loved her in a way that all simple creatures love their owner. it was brief and transactional: the cockroach pinched between candide's fingers was a token of love, and the open mouth at her feet was a receiver of that love. she knelt down, her still-blurry vision focusing on the flaring snout asking for her love. she dropped the cockroach into the open mouth, and watched as her love was crunched and separated and pulped until it fell into the creature's stomach. the lizard's tongue flashed in and out of the mouth, an 'i love you too' that tasted like protein and complete trust.
[joan was conditional. she was a teenager: the epitome of never-ending indecision. the books and blogs candide browsed when she pretended to be working had chapters or sections dedicated to the teenage condition and countless ways to remedy it. she found it odd to look for a remedy to a natural phenomenon, and would close the texts when she got to those sections. a remedy was what she wanted, but she didn't like it framed as such. joan was not something to be fixed or sculpted against her own wishes.]
[it did not escape her that there was also someone that joan regarded as her caregiver before candide. she wondered if she would ever live up to what joan had left behind in her previous life.]
joan let the front door slam behind her on her way out. the action lightly rattled the window frames and stirred the rest of candide's lizards that had been dormant. warm steam left the bathroom to brush candide's cheek and remind her of her routine. she turned around to enter the bathroom, leaving the cockroach container on her dresser. her fingers felt the searing heat of the pelting water and she removed her clothes to step in.
her phone buzzed on the counter. she pulled the screen close to her eyes to read the text.
from joan,
sorry for slamming the door on the way out. want me to bring home crickets for the lizards?
candide let the texts go unread and stepped into the shower. she let the water run over her head for a few seconds before poking her head out of the curtain and looking at the phone on the edge of the counter. a dripping wet arm reached for it and opened the texts from joan.
sure. thank you. see you when i get home. i can bring home dinner for us if you want.
joan liked the message.
i'll eat whatever you get.
[candide could almost see the outline of the word "mom" at the end of her text. she was almost breaking the cycle.]