by Austin Nickols.

Ember blue is the color at the base of every fire, where it’s the very hottest. This is the color of my mother’s eyes, and of my own.  Light brown hair, an eccentric obsession with language, obsessive-compulsive disorder and a proximity phobia, a writer’s soul. This is my father.

This is me.

When I was 12 my best friend betrayed me, my family abandoned me and my life disintegrated into a scarlet haze. All of this, etched into my retina, burned into the eyes my mother gave me. I remember sitting in the lunchroom, bruises hidden just out of sight, chocolate milk soaking my shirt, wondering if this was my life. If I would be confined to this, hating myself and living just outside the bounds of society.

That was my worst fear.

I wasn’t afraid of my stepdad, I wasn’t afraid of my best friend, I wasn’t afraid of the people who told me God didn’t love me. I was afraid of becoming a liar, of becoming someone who thinks a church is more important than my family, I was afraid of becoming someone who’s too afraid to stand up and say enough.

I was afraid of becoming my mother.

The day I turned 17, I told myself I was stronger than her. I told myself that I was not her. I told myself that I would become the antithesis of everything my mother stood for, the hate, the fear.

And the lies.

But I knew that I would become her, just not in the way I thought. Sky blue, like crystallized snowflakes captured in a ring of deep navy, like a stormy ocean; the color of my eyes a sharp juxtaposition to the fire I remember.

Unfortunately, my mother is someone I can never escape. She’s in my blood, in my memories and in my eyes.

She is the reason I’m afraid.

But she’s also the reason that I’m alive. Without knowing what it’s like to be told how to live, I would never have known how to truly live. So, in a way I am my mother, I am the lesson she taught me, the lesson to be exactly who I am, no matter what anyone says. In a way, my mother taught me to be myself, to rise above who people want me to be. In a way, I am not my mother because I am unoriginal.