A Kind of Goodness

At the playground, my mother hid from me, I couldn’t find her, and I called her name a thousand times.

And when she reappeared, I ran to her, and she ran to me, and I clenched her neck, and I put my hands on her face, and I said, Where were you? Where were you? and she said, I’m so glad you found me. And we hugged, and she smiled as she cradled me, and I howled, like a gibbon, at her shoulder.

She did this all the time. She’d take me to a park in a far-off neighborhood where I knew no one, and after minutes of playing together, she’d disappear behind a bush or a tree and watch me, as I searched for her and begged for her return and called her name a thousand times in a private language, a language no one else understood.

Once a stranger said, Are you looking for your mom? And I nodded yes. And she pointed to a bush, but when I ran to the bush, I still couldn’t find her. She must’ve known I was coming and slipped away.

Later, my mother reappeared as if from behind a cloud and we ran to each other like two people reuniting after a lifetime apart and I wailed, a scream of both joy and terror.

Aren’t you glad you found your mother? she said.

And I nodded and made her long black hair wet with my tears.

When I was older, I decided to stop looking for her when she disappeared. I’d gotten used to it. After an hour of me playing alone, happily alone, we reunited, and she was angry, her brow pushed low above her nose, like a tumor.

Why didn’t you look for me?

I knew you were here, I said.

But I wasn’t here. I was far away.

One day she took me to a river and left me there and never returned. I survived for years, like a bear, eating only fish I caught with my hands. In my aloneness, I grew religious and counted my prayers on a fistful of pebbles I found along the stream.

I wondered the whole time if I was bad, and I still wonder. Did she no longer love me because I’d lost my need? Because I’d lost that look of desperation I’d get when I couldn’t find her? Was that desperation a kind of goodness?

I practice that look of desperation now. I raise the middle part of my brows so that they arch down at the sides, I call for her, twirling around and flailing my arms, and I imagine she is there, my mother, watching me, her face hidden behind a leaf on a tree.