From the time I was four until just after my sixteenth birthday, every day my mother would send me to bed at seven o'clock. Exactly twenty one minutes later, my door would open and she would walk silently in, gently lowering herself to sit at the bottom of my bed. She would stare blankly at the peeling wallpaper, and I would watch her profile in the dim moonlight shining in through my bare window. I would watch her lips as a faint smile ghosted over them and listened as she sighed almost inaudibly to herself, repeating the words I heard from her every day at this time; "One day, my darling. One day." She would then look down at her hands and sit quietly for a moment before rising and moving towards the door. She would stop, turn around and look at me. Our eyes would meet and she would smile. Then, she would turn around, rap her knuckles on the doorframe twice and leave the room,
closing the door behind her.

I never fully understood this ritual, I still don't. But I miss it, I miss that I can't see her how she was, how she should have been. Now, she doesn't come, though I wait for her, all through the night. I loved the times I could still see her in her eyes, not someone else just using her body. I know she can't help it, but I blame her sometimes. I try to tell myself it is not her fault and that I have to love her, no matter what happens. But the monster in me resents her for who she's not. I try to remember the times she was my mother, when she knocked on the door to exit my room and when she promised me, "one day". I know that if I let myself connect my mother with the woman I came home from school to find lying, confused and screaming, on the floor with the room in silent chaos around her, blood dried into tears on her face and crusted under her fingernails where she tore at her own skin, I wouldn't be able to hold myself together. I feel as though I am being held in one piece by a thin, old string that is bound to give out upon the slightest strain. The memory of her wild eyes, surrounded by dark, purple bruises as she stared up through me from the floor, unaware of my presence, still flash before me whenever I close my eyes.

But the warmth in her eyes as she looked at me for a single moment each night is what I hold on to, it is all I have to remember what she, and I, once were. She was my mother, the woman who always loved me and would do anything for me. Now, that woman is dead. And for this, I blame her.

Every night at twenty one minutes past seven, I stand up and I knock twice on the door. She comes me and smiles a sad smile, full of loss and hurt. I look through the small window in the steel door into her warm eyes.

"One day, my darling. One day" she murmurs softly before turning to a man dressed in white.