Song for Maria

For a woman whose face I have, I can’t seem to remember what my mother looks like. The most I could think of is a pair of lips and patches of acne that I used to read like braille. Sometimes, I confuse the dark spots on my cheeks as relics of her youth and try to find her there. But when I look in the mirror, my brain reminds me that we are two different people.

The years of being apart have rendered my mother strangely faceless. Actually, I’ve never recalled my mother ever having a physical form. In my childhood, she was a disembodied singing voice stuck in old cassettes. She used to be a vocalist in an obscure local band that never really got anywhere. She was a rockstar nonetheless.

During my early high school years, she’d taken the form of my smartphone. Sometimes, she’s only a bust—her physical features often distorted by poor signal. Most of the time, she’s just a pair of eyes and a large stretch of skin that’s the forehead. We are on either side of the world, but video calls often erase the distance. I thank God and Wi-Fi for it.

I simply think she’s created that way, the way single mothers are often made. A presence. A person that carries no past tense and speaks no passive voice. Always going, always in action, always in the now. I wondered many times what my mother looked like when she was my age, but I can’t imagine it. Single mothers erase history.

Perhaps this is why I find it tough to imagine her as a real person. When we speak through the screen, she never complains. Always beautiful and looked younger than her age. I feel as if seeing the calluses around her hands will make her come to life. And one quick glimpse will shatter my two-dimensional mother.

Sometimes I hate myself when I forget that my mother has flesh, that she has a head of hair that you can actually run your hand through. Because this destroys my mother’s story as I attempt to write new pages for her. Let her forget her failed dreams because I’ll carry her in mine. When what I should be doing is minding my own business.

But I find it hard to focus on myself when there is hurt. When my mother decided to work overseas, it was a promise of a brighter future. And I grew up believing that time is the only sacrifice. People often forget to account for tangible things as if they don’t matter. I feel like I’ve exchanged my mother for a college degree and a nice home.

In my eyes, that’s what my mother did. Trading another chance at love to slave away instead in a foreign land. You can’t redo a barter of life, so I feel guilty. Here at home, I hold the fruits of her labor and waste them like it’s my own. I carry no pride in stealing her dreams and replacing her thunder with drizzle.

Guilty people like me don’t want to remember a person in the flesh. My mother will have the physical marks of hard work and old age on her skin. Too much to handle. That’s why growing up, you preserve her face the way you last saw it. So you forget she’s working for you, so you forget what she had to leave behind.

Now in Hong Kong for many years, I think my mother thinks of me the same way. That I no longer exist to her in my human form. That I carry no past tense as well and no history of my own memories. My consciousness trapped within a call button, ceasing when the call ends, reborn when she sends a message.

Although at the end of it all, at least I’ll get to see her again very soon. Maybe I’ll make her my favorite coffee and take her out for a short shopping spree. I won’t give her much of a grand gesture, as she’s not coming home as a hero. She’s only a mom forced to work to raise her two kids. To treat her like a real person is what she deserves.

Or maybe I’ll sing her a song, the one she used to play in that rock band ages ago. I’ll get a reminder of that old van where she and her bandmates used to stack cassette tapes and songbooks made from printed song lyrics. It was my happiest memory of her. She was young, careless, and brimming with life.

I hope the moment she lands at the airport she’ll recognize me immediately. The one face that stands out from the crowd. I hope she jogs toward us with giddy steps. She’ll wrap her arms around me and my sister, I know it. And for a little while, I get to savor that small moment when she’s here.

Kim Argosino, 24, is a writer, daughter, dog mom, and a frustrated pop star. She listens to Taylor Swift at least six hours a day.