She Always Walks In

The mother line is the one that broke something. I knew it would be. I have been building walls between her and this for two years now and they walked into a Kroger in Atlanta and pointed a phone at her like they were ordering off a menu. Last Tuesday. While I was pressing a lint roller on a blazer in Murray Hill. They already had her face.

I sent the rice-and-beans text. Goodnight love you. If I call her she will hear something. She will worry and the worry will live in her shoulders and I can hear my mother in her shoulders from Brooklyn.

The screenshot. Six of eight. Kips Bay. Tribeca. I read the names of my own week out loud in my head and each one landed like a coin. That client in Kips Bay with the kid. That closet in Tribeca. Those are mine. I built them. I carried the rack up the stairs. And now a man I have never met wrote them down like he was circling blocks, and underneath he typed the sentence that made me understand I have been a thing that walks into rooms.

She will walk in. She always walks in.

Yes. Because that is the job. And the job is the only thing I built that is mine and I am not giving it to a man who writes sentences about me like I am weather.