lately, i have been finding my parents in impossible places. my mother's patience in the kitchen sink. my father's silence in the hallway mirror. yesterday, i opened my mouth and our family tree spoke first. i wish inheritance announced itself more dramatically. a letter. a ceremony. a small envelope addressed, congratulations! you now interrupt people exactly like your father. instead it arrives quietly. you hear yourself sigh a certain way. you stand at a window without realizing you've been waiting there for twenty minutes. you apologize using the same words your mother uses. you become someone else's childhood without noticing. my mother waits at windows before people are due home. half an hour early. sometimes longer. she says she's checking the weather. i have never once seen the weather arrive on a scooter. once she waved at the vegetable vendor because she thought he was my father from the balcony. he waved back. we laughed about it for weeks. my father laughed the hardest. which is strange. because for a long time, laughter arrived in our house much earlier than conversation did. there were years when the quiet between my parents grew so loud i thought everyone else could hear it. my father stayed. he never stopped loving us. it's just that sometimes his love arrived carrying shopping bags instead of conversations. he'd come home with pastries from a bakery we'd never tried. or announce we were going out for dosas before anyone had time to ask whether we were hungry. once he drove almost an hour because my sister mentioned a café she'd seen online. we spent more time looking for parking than we spent inside. i don't remember what we talked about. i remember the hot chocolate. i remember him asking if we wanted dessert before we'd finished eating. i remember thinking, this must be his language. it took me years to realize that languages can be fluent and incomplete at the same time. my mother speaks differently. once she rested my head in her lap and told me stories about when my sister and i were babies. she laughed so hard she had to stop talking. i remember thinking no one in the world had ever looked at me that gently. a week later, during a fight, she said, "sometimes i think i love you less."
i have spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to make those two versions of her shake hands. they refuse. i love my mother. this should not be a difficult sentence. it is. people pass strange things down. recipes. eye colour. ways of arguing. ways of waiting. ways of staying without really arriving. my mother also keeps things nobody else would. old chargers that belong to phones we no longer own. buttons. receipts. plastic containers without lids. every time i ask why, she says, "we might need them someday." i inherited the habit differently. i painted a potato purple once. his name is humpty dumpty. before him there was an avocado seed called kuku. my sister threw kuku away. i cried so dramatically that she apologized. she still insists it was an accident. i choose to believe her because the alternative feels exhausting. humpty dumpty survived. mostly. my sister thinks he's hideous. she says he looks diseased. she also held him while the paint dried because i kept smudging him. she complained the entire time. every few minutes she'd sigh and say, "this is so stupid." she never put him down. i don't know if love has ever sounded more like complaining. which is unfair. because when we fight, she has a sentence she only uses when she's trying to hurt me. "you're just like them." she doesn't say it often. she doesn't have to. once is enough to last months. i become very calm after she says it.
which is exactly the problem. i keep saying my father is quiet. that's not entirely true. he laughs at terrible action films. he argues with cricket commentators through the television. he snores loudly enough that closed doors become suggestions. what i mean is— there are certain conversations he walks around instead of through. i have caught myself doing the same thing. it is easier than i expected. that scares me more than almost anything. my greatest fear is becoming my parents. this is unfair. they are not villains. they are people. which is somehow more frightening. because people pass themselves down without asking permission. sometimes in the way they love. sometimes in the way they leave. sometimes in the words that escape your mouth before you've had time to decide whether you believe them. yesterday, i stood in front of the hallway mirror. for a second, i looked exactly like neither of them. relief arrived first. loneliness was only a few seconds behind.