On the day that you, fifteen, tell your mother you are sorry for saying words that hurt her, you will stand on the bottom tread but one of the hush-carpeted stairs that run through the middle of the two-story house. She will stand in the doorway to the blue dining room, which leads to the kitchen from which you’ve called her. She will furrow her brow, tilt her head, and say Thank you for saying that, then look down and wring her hands, or maybe a kitchen towel. Next, not meeting your eyes, she will heft a hurt into the air, heavy under the weight of double negative: This doesn’t mean you’re not still grounded.

You will understand that she did not understand. She will turn and walk back to the kitchen, or perhaps continue on through the foyer into the living room, circling through the house a different way to return from where she began; you will pad silently back up the stairs to finish out the hour of Stay in your bedroom and think about what you said, which you would have done, anyway, which you had been doing already, silent and dry-eyed under the burden of the hurt you had heaved at her first.

You won’t ever know if she cried to herself over the dishes afterward, or if her chest clenched in some uncertainty over her response, or if her gaze softened in curiosity about what you, her daughter, might actually have meant when you said, Mom, I’m sorry. The two of you will never speak of this again. Over the years, you will forget word after word of almost constant kindness and care at her hands, but this one rebuff will haunt you. You won’t notice until your own children are eight and twelve-years-old how, on the one hand, you desire to receive their words like jewels, like fragile China teacups you would call beautiful and hold steady and never, ever drop—and, on the other, how easily you fail to listen to them when the time comes.

One day, when you are forty-five, you will be scrolling social media and will skim across the phrase, “For People with Dry Eyes.” You will misunderstand for a moment and think I want to read that article. But it isn’t an article, only an advertisement for medicated eye drops. No matter. The notion is locked in your psyche, and that evening, you will tell your husband how you have found yourself too distracted lately to look your youngest in the eye, and suddenly you’ll be sobbing, your cheeks soaked and softened in the salty flood. The moment on the stairs with your mom will return again, and you will notice for the first time where in the house you were standing that day when you were fifteen and meant what you said and your mother was hovering in the doorway, and how both of you even now are still on your way to where you are going.

-Rebecca Martin

Rebecca D. Martin is an autistic writer living in Virginia with her husband and two daughters. Her work has been published in the Curator, the Brevity blog, Proximity, and Isele, among others. She can be found at https://rebeccadmartin.substack.com/, where she talks about some of her favorite things, including poetry, houses, and neurodiversity. On Thursday, she feeds bearded dragons at her local nature center.