The Third Shadow

I have long suspected that I was not born, but exhaled into this world—like a sigh nobody wished to hear. There was a time I believed my mother loved me, but this illusion did not survive past the age of speech. Her gaze, sharp and luminous, devoured me. She loved not me, but her reflection in me. I was her proof, her echo, her living ornament. When I laughed, she clapped; when I cried, she withdrew with an offended silence, as if I had insulted her with my pain.

In those early years, she was everything. I say this not with warmth but with the horror of a prisoner recalling the uniform of his jailer. Her presence was absolute, her moods unrelenting tides that drenched every corner of my being. I did not speak—I responded. I did not feel—I monitored. My will was not mine, but leased to me under conditions I could never satisfy. And when I failed, as I always did, shame was my inheritance.

My father? He was there, I suppose. A quiet man. Pale, spectral. He read his books and smoked at the window like a ghost rehearsing the act of being alive. He never raised a hand, never raised his voice, never raised me. He was the man behind the curtain that no one bothered to pull aside. I would speak and he would nod. Sometimes not even that. His indifference was a silence that roared in my soul.

It was not until much later that I realized what had been missing: the third shadow. In a world where the child orbits the sun of the mother, it is the father who must tilt the axis, who must say, “You are not her. You are you.” But mine never spoke those words. He never cut the cord, never drew the sacred line that allows the child to stand apart and become. He left me inside her orbit, a planet with no sun of its own, glowing only when she looked.

So I became clever. I studied her moods, predicted her storms, bent myself into shapes that pleased her. When she cried, I comforted. When she boasted, I applauded. When she scolded, I apologized—even for the things I never did. In time, I could not distinguish my thoughts from her expectations. My reflection in the mirror seemed fraudulent, unearned. I was not someone. I was a performance. And I performed well.

But even the best actors forget their lines.

In school, I felt out of place. My peers had fathers who intervened, who roared or laughed or embraced. Mine was a coat on a hanger in the hallway, vaguely shaped like a man. And so I searched—desperately—for someone to see me. I tried lovers, teachers, gods. I tried to please, to perfect, to vanish. I mistook criticism for truth, neglect for normalcy, and praise for salvation.

Do you know what it is to grow up without a boundary? It is to feel either everything or nothing. Love is suffocating, attention is dangerous, autonomy is guilt. I cannot rest. I cannot be. I only know how to become what others need.

And when they don’t need me? I disappear.

There are days I wonder if I ever existed at all, or if I am merely the unfinished thoughts of two people who could not bear to raise something real. My mother raised a mirror. My father raised... nothing.

But I am trying now. I am trying to raise myself.

I sit in silence and ask: What do I feel? What do I want? Who am I, if I am not what they made me?

Sometimes the answers do not come. But still, I ask. That, at least, is mine.