I was too young when she turned me to remember it now. But she’s told me of how it happened. How ill I was. How at nighttime, she snuck into the nursery room I was being kept in, unplugged my monitors, opened my incubator, and plucked me out like a chicken egg. She held me close to her skin, although unlike an egg and a bird, it was my skin that warmed my mother’s and not the other way around. And then my mum bit me on the neck, holding my head in one hand and my body in the other, and, apparently, I didn’t even cry. Then she bit her own arm and had me suckle from it. The first meal I ate. And I was saved.

When I was maybe nine or ten, my mum told me that turning me was the biggest sacrifice she had ever made, “because I didn’t know whether you’d grow up still or if you’d just be stuck as a baby forever, stuck as my responsibility forever.” But now I wonder whether she somehow knew all along that I would continue growing and whether she had just said that to make me feel indebted to her. And if that was the case, it worked. It excused her behavior. Her madness and her fluctuating moods, her self-hatred, while I was growing up. Everything in me that makes me anxious moving forward in life, that makes me feel as though I’m doing things wrong, that I’m not on the right path somehow, that I’m bad in some way, comes from her, and yet I’ve always forgiven her. She once told me that while she was pregnant she worried that I would come out full demon—basically, just a shadow with eyes that engulfed people and drained them of all their humanity. When she told me that, I expected her to follow it up with a sentence beginning, “But, you were . . .” or “But, I shouldn’t have worried,” but she didn’t. Now I wonder if I’ve been useful to her only as something she can pour everything she despises about herself into, something that she could raise to hate itself so that she’d have company in her feelings. “We are both things that have been raised not from birth but from death,” she once said. “From an ending rather than a beginning, and we will exist together until we die again and the world dies with us.”

We’re apart now. Properly apart. And I feel I can finally start my life. But the burden of her loneliness feels like it’ll never leave me.