Mother’s Colors (Emerging Writer’s Contest Winner: NONFICTION)

In nonfiction, our winner is Billy Lezra, for their piece “Mother’s Colors.”

This year’s nonfiction judge was Augusten Burroughs. Of the essay, he writes: “The writer deftly brings a lifetime of trauma and fractured communication with their mother into focus with gorgeous writing and sharp details, skillfully drawing a Madrid neighborhood as a character as much as a backdrop. The ever-so-slightly detached tone underscores the horror and somehow brings us closer to their hearts and minds, an admirable literary feat. This is impressive on every level.”

What inspired “Mother’s Colors”?

It is impossible to count the number of drafts and iterations and workshops this piece has moved through; what inspired the writing and rewriting was an urge to capture my devolution. It took me about eight years to write this piece, and it still doesn’t feel finished.

What did you discover or grapple with while writing this piece?

This is something I discover with most everything I write these days: the moment I think I have arrived at a solid interpretation or understanding of a feeling or event, I learn or experience something that complicates and unstitches what I know. At this point, I have become more interested in presenting multiple perspectives and seemingly conflicting truths than in arriving at any unified conclusion.

Who are you reading right now, and who informs your work?

Right now I am reading Myriam Gurba, Raquel Gutiérrez, Pol Guasch, and a lot of research about memory. I am very interested in the way language—how we describe a memory—influences what we retain. The conversations I have day to day also inform my work—my conversations with my mother, my partner, peers, and mentors. I am constantly learning from the people around me.

What advice do you have for aspiring writers?

The single most helpful thing I ever did for my writing was to work with a writing partner—someone I exchange pages with every week. These pages can be rough sketches of ideas, revisions, the same paragraph with tiny line-edits, absolutely anything. I recommend working one-on-one (in addition to workshops) because it builds a special kind of trust and lack of self-consciousness. Your writing partner doesn’t have to write in your genre; the most important thing is that you like them as a person, respect their mind, and learn from how they read and critique you.

What projects are you working on now? Where is your writing headed?

I am working on a reported memoir titled Vital Parts that queers narratives about addiction. My writing is headed into finding more ways to present and contain mutable truths.

     

1.

The day my mother and I drove to Rascafría was blisteringly blue. We held hands as she steered her green Volvo past sloping wheat fields, through a thick forest. The cold wind poured through the car’s open window and blew her auburn ringlets all over her face. That morning, my mother had decided she wanted to move away from Madrid—where we lived with my grandmother—to Rascafría, a tiny town a few hours north. This was a common occurrence: Violet and I moved to a different part of Spain every so often, but we always returned to my grandmother’s apartment, as if pulled by an invisible cord.

In between cigarettes, Violet recited the story she told whenever we moved away from my grandmother. There’s a scapegoat in every family, and I am the scapegoat in mine. The scapegoat must be very strong because it is blamed for the sins of the system. Do you see?

I didn’t see, but I nodded. I was only nine.

On some level, it felt safer to trust that she could perceive truths that eluded me, even if the truths were strange, than to believe that she, the center of my universe, was untrustworthy. But deep down, I questioned the way Violet interpreted events, and I feared her alcohol use. If you were to ask her, she would say that she drank every few years with long stretches of sobriety in between. If you were to ask me, I would say that when she drank, she broke bottles, furniture, skin, promises, and people. Eventually, Violet parked in front of the frothy river that ran through Rascafría, kicked off her sandals, plunged her feet in the water, and tilted her face toward the pale sun. The light threaded through her hair, each strand glistened. She looked relaxed, which meant I could relax, too. I dipped my toes in the river. The water was so cold it burned.

Violet reached into a plastic grocery bag and extracted a box of cigarettes, a bottle of beer, a loaf of bread, and a bar of chocolate. She sliced the bread into palm-shaped pieces with a pocket knife, broke off several dark squares, placed them between the slices, and offered me a tiny chocolate sandwich. The flaky bread stuck to the roof of my mouth as the chocolate melted into a sweet, bitter pool on my tongue. The combination was starchy, strange, and delicious. I cupped my palms, reached toward the river, filled my hands, and drank: the water tasted like wildflowers.

Hours passed.

As the sun set into the river, my mother leaned forward. With her bottle of beer she gestured toward the ripples. “What colors do you see?”

This was one of our games: she would point at something beautiful and I would identify as many colors as I could. Then she would chime in with shades that were imperceptible to my eye until she named them.

I squinted. “The sun is making the water yellow and pink, with hints of gold.” 

“And what else?” 

“The sky is like a burnt orange,” I said.

“There’s a specific word for that color. Do you know what it is?” I shook my head.

“Ochre.”

“Ochre.” The word felt sticky, like honey. Violet put her chin on my shoulder. 

My body softened; I leaned against her.

She smelled like chocolate and tobacco.

“I see ruby red swirls in the water,” she said. “The muddy riverbed contrasts against the sky’s ochre reflection, which gives the river a touch of bronze. And in the bronze I see slivers of turquoise.”

As she spoke I saw these colors, gradually at first, but then completely. I loved when my mother interacted with the world this way: it made me feel as if I had stepped into a gorgeous dimension only she could unlock. The entire river looked like it had been plucked from another planet.

“Do you see?” she asked. 

“I see.”

I stood and retrieved my sketchbook and colored pencils from the Volvo’s trunk. I sat back down and drew the river with all the shades that Violet had named, to make sure I would remember them. Then I turned to a new page. With a maroon pencil I sketched the slant of my mother’s spine, the thick curls that framed her face, her fine lips. I made her arms long, tan, muscular, spattered with clay. I drew a tea-pot between her hands. Underneath the picture I wrote: happy. With a gray pencil I traced a vertical line next to her body and sketched a second image: Violet holding a bottle of beer in one hand, a lit cigarette in the other. I made her curls lank, lips curled downward, and drew deep circles under her eyes. I added black ceramic shards by her ankles. Underneath the picture I wrote: sad.

I don’t remember whether I showed my mother the pictures on purpose or if she saw them by accident.

Violet reached for my sketchbook, scowled, and tossed it into my lap. “I do not want these images of myself.”

She stood and walked toward the car. 

I crumpled the pictures into a paper ball and held it underwater.

The images turned to pulp, my fingers numbed. I got back into the Volvo.

Silently, my mother drove back to Madrid, back to my grandmother’s apartment. I reached for her hand, she swatted me away.

Now, when I think about that day, I wonder: what if I hadn’t drawn those stupid pictures?

What if we had just moved to Rascafría and never returned to Madrid?

     

2.

My grandmother’s apartment was located on a dead-end street called Calle Abedul. In Spanish, dead-end streets are called calles ciegas, as in, “blind” streets. In my memory, a chicken wire fence stood at the end of Calle Abedul. Thorny bushes grew behind the fence, speckled with poisonous, bright-red berries. “Abedul” translates to “birch tree,” but there were no birch trees on this street. Chestnut trees stood shoulder to shoulder; thin branches burst with white blossoms in the summer; mauve chestnuts bounced on the sidewalks in the fall. The apartment was on the third floor of a brick building. A silver key unlocked the heavy mahogany door, which swung open to a hallway decorated with a granite table that displayed a translucent vase full of flowers from my grandmother’s garden: pansies, petunias, roses. To the right, a door made out of white wood and opaque crystal panes separated my mother’s room and bathroom from the rest of the apartment.

The moment I walked through the mahogany door I didn’t have to worry about Violet because my grandmother was in charge. But these reprieves never lasted—at some point, my mother and my grandmother would fight, we would move away, and the cycle would begin anew. This pattern went on throughout my childhood and well into my adolescence.

The year I turned fifteen, we made it all the way to California until Violet returned to Calle Abedul the year I turned nineteen. Instead of moving back to Spain with her, I enrolled in a university in northern California and visited Madrid every summer, right as the chestnut trees blossomed. Each time a taxi drove me to Calle Abedul from the airport, I warned the drivers: Cuidado, que es una calle ciega. They never took me to the end of the street because it was too hard to turn around.

The year I turned twenty-three, the day I arrived on Calle Abedul for my annual visit, my grandmother opened the door before I could unlock it. She wrapped her hand around my elbow and pulled me down the hallway, past the vase of roses, into the kitchen.

“I didn’t want to tell you this before you arrived, but your mother hasn’t left her room in weeks. Last night she put her laptop under a running faucet.”

My initial reaction was annoyance, not concern. I wanted to eat and sleep after my twelve-hour flight; I didn’t want to troubleshoot Violet’s state of mind. But my grandmother’s blue eyes were round with alarm. Her body looked frail, as if her spine were made out of glass. 

“Did she say why?”

“She said she wanted to disappear without a trace.”

I left the kitchen and knocked on my mother’s bedroom door. 

“Pasa,” she said.

The room smelled like smoke and wine. My mother sat cross-legged in an unmade bed; the top sheet had a coffee-stain shaped like a poppy. She was dressed in a black and white striped sweatshirt. In one hand, she held a lit cigarette, in the other, a green pencil.

“When did you get here?” 

“Just now,” I said. “What are you drawing?” 

She held up her sketchbook. A mesmerizing network of ivy leaves swept across the page. “Did my mother say anything about me to you?” she asked as she drew another leaf. 

“Just that you broke your laptop.”

“She’s a liar.”

“So you didn’t break your laptop?”

She extinguished her cigarette in the heart of a leaf. 

The smell of burning paper filled the room. 

     

3.

Here time becomes murky; I am not sure how many days went by or if the days were weeks. What I do know is that one afternoon my mother retreated to the bathroom, closed the door, and turned on the faucets. I sat in the living room on a burgundy couch next to my grandmother, and listened to the rushing sound seep through the thin walls. Outside, sun rays tinged the clouds coral and fuchsia. The air smelled like chestnut blossoms, sugar, sun.

I didn’t know it then, but this was the last time I would watch the sunset with my grandmother in the apartment on Calle Abedul. The moments before your life detonates can feel so unremarkable.

It took almost an hour for me to realize my mother was still in the bathroom.

I crossed the apartment, and knocked on the door. 

“You good?” I asked.

Silence.

I pushed the door open. 

A crack, the sound of my knees hitting the floor. 

When the first responders arrived, they found me in the bathtub, wrapping towels around the cuts on my mother’s arms. The cops, dressed in black, pulled me out of the tub so the paramedics, dressed in dark blue, could find her pulse. You found her just in time, someone said. You should be proud. 

I felt no pride, just an ache that traveled from my eyes, down my jaw, through my muscles, to the soles of my feet. I was certain I could have stopped this had I jumped up the moment I heard water. Perhaps the idea that I could have prevented her pain is as fanciful as the idea that I could have stopped a natural disaster. I am not sure what hurts more: thinking I had power or knowing I had none. I wanted to rip up my brain. From my mother’s bedroom window, I watched the ambulance’s red and blue lights travel away, the sirens distant as my breath.

I lit one of Violet’s cigarettes and opened the window. Below me, Madrid was iridescent, as if flecked with little jewels. I watched the cityscape light up as tendrils of smoke unfurled from my teeth into the wind. As I smoked, I read the note she’d left behind on a legal pad the size of my hand. The note was short, just a few sentences. All of her possessions were for me; if I didn’t want them, I was to donate them to organizations that worked on behalf of “the animals.”

I sat in her unmade bed, glanced around the room, and surveyed my inheritance: the purple, green, pink, red, yellow pencils; her clothes, art books, jewelry, makeup. I imagined myself stuffing these items into a cardboard box, moseying over to the local animal shelter, and dumping them on the counter. 

“This is your lucky day,”I’d announce to the nonplussed volunteer. “I bear pearls and pencils for the cats.” 

I picked up Violet’s sketchbook and traced my finger along the ivy leaves she’d been drawing the day I arrived in Madrid. I re-read her note, took a picture of it with my phone, held the piece of paper out the window, and set it on fire with a match. I stubbed my cigarette out on the window sill, closed my mother’s bedroom door, walked past the bathroom, past the vase of roses from my grandmother’s garden, through the front door, up Calle Abedul, away from the dead end.

     

4.

I returned to northern California, started my junior year of college, and blocked Violet on my phone, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. The only way she could reach me was via email: all her messages went to a special inbox quarantined from the rest of my correspondence. The password to the special inbox was theanimals123. I told myself I blocked her because I needed space to concentrate on college, but in reality, I just wanted to protect myself. Excising Violet from my life felt like an instinct, not a choice, like standing very still when a frozen lake cracks under your feet.

For two years, my special inbox filled up with sad questions. Is this how you treat someone you love? Don’t you think I deserve compassion and kindness after what I have been through? The word “remember” surfaced in Violet’s emails the way oil floats on water. Don’t you remember how much I love you? Don’t you remember everything I did for you, how hard I worked to raise you; don’t you remember all the things we did together?

To remember suggests that something has been dis-membered; to re-member is to reassemble the pieces that have come apart. It was easy to remember my mother’s good pieces because there were so many. I could still see the way she turned a river into a rainbow; I could hear the cackle that spread from her chest to her throat whenever she watched a funny movie. I could feel the phantom hours she spent feeding me, dressing me, driving me, teaching me to talk, walk, read, paint, swim, dive. All the time and energy she poured into my body lived in my organs, muscles, teeth. In one of her emails she wrote that she didn’t know whether I was actually real because she could no longer feel my presence. I understood why she felt that way; after all, if I was gone, where was the return on her investment?

But even my good memories lurched with a question—how long until her joy soured? How do I measure the impact of the nights she left me alone in strange places? How do I quantify the pain of possibility, the damage of what could have been? It would be so much easier if I could reduce Violet to a single state of being, but her multiplicity was what devastated me—she was tender and glorious and protective and cruel; she was my favorite person in the world and also the person who scared me the most. I didn’t know how to cope with this opposition, so I drank.

Every night I chugged nine-dollar whiskey that tasted like straw. In the mornings, the hangovers obliterated space for memory and emotion; the absence of suffering was more addictive than the alcohol itself. With each passing day, my fingers became more swollen until none of my silver rings fit. My eyes were jaundiced, my mouth bitter; my neck, back, arms, and fingers cracked when I moved, the pellets of air between my joints bursting like bubbles of gum.

One afternoon, I bought some molly from a man standing on the corner of a street in San Francisco. I bit off a chunk of the cube and washed it down with lemon Gatorade; the molly tasted metallic. As the heat in my body rose, I made my way to a park and lay on the grass. Above me, eucalyptus trees swung and squeaked; fleshy clouds dappled the sky.

I closed my eyes and was transported to an imagined memory: me as a young child, playing with my mother as a little girl. We sat on a beach and sculpted sand castles, decorating them with sea glass and large, white shells. My mother’s face was shaped like the sun, lit up by a crooked smile missing two teeth. Everything I loved about her was concentrated in her tiny self: the way her eyebrows furrowed as she tinkered with our castle, the way her brown eyes glowed when she found a shell she loved. Suddenly, a huge wave broke onto the shore; water and sea foam liquified our castle; we jumped up and down, hugged each other, and laughed. As I held my mother, I could see flashes of the suffering that would befall her—I could see the people who would hurt her; I could feel her pincering loneliness.

By the time I opened my eyes, I was really high, not quite sure where my body ended or where the earth began. I pulled out my phone and looked for my mother’s number. I wanted to tell her that I had just seen us together as children, that we were precious, that our castle was the best one on the beach until it crumbled. But then I remembered: if I called her I wouldn’t reach the person I missed. I grasped the trunk of the eucalyptus tree and heaved myself upright. My cheeks were cold, speckled with drops of rain, or dew, or tears, or sea. I don’t remember how I made it home.

     

5.

Home changed the year I turned twenty-seven, after I graduated college. I moved four hours north of San Francisco, past towns with one church, one school, one bar, past hills dotted with apple orchards and vineyards, through a redwood forest to a tiny cabin on a cliff that overlooked the churning Pacific Ocean. Everywhere I looked was green: pine, sage, emerald, olive, juniper. A weeping willow stretched above the cabin’s thatched roof; strands of air moss hung from the branches. The outside of the cabin was painted the color of rust. Inside, the walls were ochre; the floors were made from redwood beams with veins and knots that appeared to pulse.

By day, I wrote newsletters, blogs, and social media captions for a marketing company. By night, I drank whiskey and watched the words “COVID-19” populate the news cycles. My mother was still blocked on my phone, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram, but, prompted by the pandemic, I had started to respond to more of her emails—the speed with which the virus was killing people made me afraid I wouldn’t see her again. Initially, my emails were guarded—I sent recipes, COVID updates, pictures of my surroundings: gnarled cypress trees that looked like they had ballerinas trapped in the bark, pearly baby seals, wild turkeys, sunsets that turned the ocean pink.

Violet praised my pictures, the colors, shadows, and composition. “Menudo ojazo que tienes,” she wrote, again and again. Soon, seeing her name in my inbox made me feel excited. The more we spoke, the more I realized how our estrangement had translated into an estrangement from my motherland, my mother tongue, from myself. For years I’d barely spoken Castellano because the language hurt my mouth and mind; I’d crumple when I saw images of Madrid in movies. Being in touch with Violet felt like homecoming.

Eventually, we scheduled a Zoom call. When Violet’s face filled the screen I was taken aback by how beautiful she looked: her eyes were clear, bright, the color of brown sugar, her high cheekbones cast oblique shadows along her face. She rested her chin on her hand and stared into the screen as if she were trying to memorize me. She spoke about her past three years of sobriety and the way she had identified alcohol as the source of her deepest self-destruction.

“I need you to understand something about the bathtub incident,” she said. “First, I was drunk. Second, I do not consider it to be a suicide attempt. I was trying to replicate a painting with my body, but I didn’t understand that I could have died. Does that make sense?”

“You mean you were trying to use your body to make art?” I asked. 

“Exactly.” 

Somehow, this information was better than the idea that my mother had actually wanted to die. I felt stupid for blocking her, callous for not speaking to her sooner.

“Which painting were you trying to replicate?”

“The Death of Marat.”

“You could have staged a cuter painting, no?” I asked. 

She threw her head back and cackled.

“Like why not stage a little tea party? Or literally anything else?”

“I’m so sorry you found me like that,” she said. “It must have been an awful scene.” 

“It wasn’t amazing.”

She laughed again.

If we can laugh about this maybe everything will be fine, I thought.

“Can I have your address?” she asked. “I have so many presents I’ve been collecting for you.”

At first, I hesitated. 

But I wanted the presents—she was the best gift-giver. 

I gave her my address.

After we got off the call, I Googled The Death of Marat. The painting depicted the murder of the revolutionary anti-royalist Jean-Paul Marat, a journalist who often wrote from his bathtub. In the painting, a shirtless figure languished in a dark bathtub as he held a quill and a piece of paper. His hair was wrapped in a white sheet; a line of blood trickled from a wound under his collarbone. His killer was a young woman called Charlotte Corday. The murder was designed to look like a suicide. 

     

6.

The presents began to arrive the week after our Zoom call: my mother sent me a crimson leather jacket I’d been eying on Etsy, four lace dresses, two pinstripe blazers, expensive metallic eyeshadow I’d been coveting from Chanel.

How did you know I wanted these things? I wrote. 

Yo lo sé todo, she replied.

And then the books arrived: Overcoming Childhood Neglect. Surviving Narcissistic Parents. 

It is of utmost importance that you read these texts carefully in order to understand what I have been through, Violet wrote. 

I wondered whether she realized that I too had been through some of the circumstances the books described, but I didn’t say anything. I sent her a thank you note each time a present arrived, which escalated the frequency of our communication. Soon came a request: she wanted me to help her think about how to ship some items from her storage unit in California all the way to Spain. I’d like your input on the matter; I don’t think this is too much to ask, she wrote.

I didn’t know how to tell her that our relationship felt too new and tender to be saddled with a transactional dynamic; that the last thing I wanted was to talk about her storage unit; that it felt wrong to accept her sweet presents when I was offering nothing in return; that I worried that with each gift I risked her resentment. So I said nothing, which hurt her feelings. Soon, we were fighting again. 

One morning, I caught myself getting rid of some clothes in order to make room for the garments Violet had sent me. As I observed myself, I realized that her gifts represented my fear within our relationship: that beauty came at a cost. With every curative moment came a question: when will the other shoe drop?

I dropped my clothes on the floor, put my head in my hands, and pressed my palms into my eyes. I saw the river in Rascafría, the maroon and gray images I drew of my mother, “happy” and “sad,” my imagined memory of us both on the beach as children, the way she grinned whenever she ate something sweet, the way her expression sharpened right before she said something unkind. The chocolate sandwich. The bathtub. 

How can so many conflicting things be true? I wondered.

How can I have the good and swallow the bad?

I couldn’t, I realized; not now—maybe later.

I laughed, my eyes wet.

     

7.

I return to Madrid the year I turn thirty-one. The chestnut trees on Calle Abedul are blossomless, the winter sky so blue my eyes hurt. I dig my hands into the pockets of my leather jacket, the crimson one Violet sent me, and walk down Calle Abedul, toward my grandmother’s apartment. The street is silent except for sparrows, fluttering, and the clack-clack of my high-heeled boots. Dead, wet chestnut leaves plaster the sidewalk; the air smells like rain and fresh cement. The buildings, trees, and parked cars all look smaller than I remember.

It has been almost ten years since I was last in Madrid, since I last saw my mother in person. Today, she lives in the north of Spain—she doesn’t know I am here. Enough time has passed for me to know that our relationship is as mutable as the weather, seasonal, sometimes warm, sometimes cold. But today, being in Madrid without her knowledge is a step toward reclaiming my motherland, on my own terms.

I reach the iron gate in front of my grandmother’s building and run my hand along the curls of ivy that weave between the cold bars. I extract the silver key from my pocket, the one that used to unlock the apartment’s mahogany front door, and tap it against the gate, once, twice. This key won’t work—the locks have been changed—and my grandmother doesn’t live here anymore; she died last year.

The grief of losing a loved one to death is certain: they are gone and they will never come back, physically, at least. But the grief of losing someone to estrangement is elastic—it is not clear where the pain ends or begins. I don’t know how to make sense of the fact that my mother exists on this earthly plane, heart pumping blood fizzy with oxygen–that we are in the same country but that she feels intangible, like vapor, even though she is alive. I have to hope that someday the vapor will concretize into matter I can grasp. But not now, not yet.

I slip the silver key back into my pocket, pull out my phone, and take pictures of the metal sign that says “Calle Abedul,” of the iron gate, of the ivy. I open the voice memo app and record the wind sweeping through the trees’ bare branches, the sound of the sparrows’ beating wings. I put my phone away and take a step back.

As I prepare to walk to the top of Calle Abedul, I glance to my left: the fence that used to close the dead end has been yanked out of the ground. The gnarled bushes with the poisonous red berries are gone, too. In their place is an open space, a clear path.