possible future for our daughter #683

In this future, my mistakes as a parent—the ones my friends told me not to beat myself up about—they make a difference. They’re the first divots of trauma in Melody’s soon-to-be-totaled-out soul. I can hold her attention for a few brief years with watercolors and pipe cleaners before she breaks from my gravitational pull. By five, she sees straight through me, concludes that I’m a sorry excuse for a mother; I could’ve tried harder, that her proximity to my battered star cannot sustain human life.

It’s obvious, she tells me the day she detaches from my orbit, that I do not love myself, and therefore, I cannot properly love her. She isn’t wrong. As history has shown us, the women in my family are not reliable suns; we are inept at warming.

I let her go, watch her whirl away; a single speck of stardust, my solar nebula, barreling through the great expanse. In the blackness she gathers things, harnessing her memories of Disney princesses and Taylor Swift lyrics, recites the stories we read to her about thunder cake and filling buckets. She constructs Magna-Tile forests, Cinnamon Toast Crunch mansions with Frosted Flake roofs. With these materials, she builds her own planet, one filled with children, that in its early stages is just a giant pool party where kids squirt each other in the eyes with water guns. Here, our daughter is The Queen Mermaid and receives unlimited popsicles, tossing the half-melted ones to kids who leave their cherished toys at her Outshine alter. She is a lawless space ruler, finned and feral. Hairbrushes, toothbrushes—what the fuck are those? She eats Sour Patch Kids for breakfast. She grinds the sandpapery gummies in her rotting teeth, shredding our favorite books with unapproved adult scissors. She can’t hear our nervous begging. Her spacesuit is resistant to interplanetary adult interference. Lightyears away, her power grows. She forms strange opinions about how much fruit punch is safe to drink, how telling the truth is a waste of time. Her tongue is an orange Fanta-flavored scythe. She can dismantle a weak argument in seconds, make you feel as small as you always feared you are.

Back home, we receive middle-of-the-night texts from the other children about her crimes. We learn at this point she has a pretty advanced addiction to a pill made from pulverized spacerock and some kind of odorless cooking oil.

The day we get news of the coup, Melody is no longer queen of her planet. We’re told she’s returned to Earth with a boyfriend, Surge. Together, they rob pharmacies. Maybe they start a cult that inspires a Hulu documentary series or, they become Protestants or, they plot to murder us and do.

Anyway, in this nightmare future, she dies well before us, or directly after us.

When she’s mourned in our world, they call her a lost soul, wasted potential. Of course, her end can be traced back to my dreadful parenting. It’s obvious to everyone­—the media, the President, churches, schools, our friends and families—her violent end was the fault of the mother.

Somewhere like death, our ghosts hold hands and sigh. In the afterlife, we can agree on three things:

1. We hope she’s not stuck somewhere forever with Surge.
2. We wish she were here with us in this place that smells like a parking garage.
3. We don’t blame her for anything.

Where we are is a type of purgatory, we guess, even though we’ve never believed in purgatory. In vain, we sniff the air for her soda breath, strain for echoes of her hopscotch in the stairwells. Sometimes, it feels like we’re getting close to finding her, like one of us will mistake the sound of squeaking brakes for her laugh, but that nagging fear that we’ve lost her for good? That never really goes away. We argue about what version of Melody we’ll find, where those versions are likely to be hiding. At some point in time, we release our hands to conduct our own private quests for Melody­—we both think we always knew her better—and live out eternity circling opposite floors on foot, searching, waiting for her to call.