Yesterday's Wishes

I wish my mother hadn't wept every day of her pregnancy and had actually wanted me and that my parents had shown affection to me like the ones in those YouTube family vlogs you see. That the in-crowd of mean girls hadn't pinched and kicked me because they hated that I was different and wrote stories and had my head stuck in a book of poetry. I wish when I left college that autumn-burnished afternoon I'd taken the longer route home. That the landlord's wife hadn't reappeared through her vodka-fumy fog and put the house up for sale, evicting me and that he and I hadn't told each other we just couldn't help ourselves, repeating it like a mantra over and over till the lie became the truth. That the client I shouldn't have thought of in that way had walked out of his miserable marriage and into happiness with me and I hadn't done what I did because you do what you need to do to survive. That I hadn't had to decide between a loaf of bread and a pint of milk because money was tighter than tight. That my childhood home hadn't been razed to the ground, foundations crumbling and foundering in nets of briars and brambles. That the f****d up boyfriend had given me sweet-scented roses and not the thorny red ones imprinted on my skin. That the alcoholic boyfriend hadn't collapsed to the ground like a marionette with severed strings, convulsing and suffocating on yellow bile strings. I wish I woke to sunlit dawns instead of suffering storms with pain pounding like rain and my husband had weathered those storms instead of running for the shelter of distant hills and his hand hadn't found the marble-round lump in my breast and there hadn't been a secondary one. I wish I'd felt my baby's breath upon my breast soft as a sprig of babies'-breath. That I hadn't sat on the bed edge that evening spilling pills like citrine beads into my hands. That when I held my grandmother's rheumatoid-gnarled hands in mine they hadn't crumpled like dying leaves. That my other grandmother's favourite phrase wasn't true: If wishes were fishes the sea would be full.