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Was it Tolstoy who said that everything there is to say about mothers has already been said before? Still, I suffer from a compulsion – my friend Tori describes it as a ‘difficulty with boundaries’ – that comes out particularly at parties, where I have to tell everybody about my mother. My mother, and how she’d disapprove of them, even more so that she disapproves of me. My mother, and how she casts spells to hold my hand even when I am far away, which is a way of protecting me though not a way of loving me. I told some guy this, and that my mother hurts herself often, ‘but only recreationally’. Then I told him he looked like a lop-sided Trent Reznor and didn’t he want to kiss me? This is a kind of flirting. This has never not worked.

I have had this compulsion since I was young. When I was 11 and didn’t know that Tolstoy had said everything there is to say about mothers, I would hurt my mother’s feelings by telling people about her. She wanted our relationship to be illicit. We had both made ourselves aliens to the world with our strange, double-jointed love, and I could not leave her to be an alien by herself. This added an element of passion between us. She hated being known by anybody but me. If she had to be known, she preferred to be known as me. When I was sixteen, she answered phones and signed off letters using my name. My dad stayed out of ‘whatever was going on’, and was happy for me to act as a shock absorber for her more difficult of moods. I thought this was a Christlike way to live, a way of nourishing some sort of sensitivity and empathy, but it was selfish and masochistic.

Tolstoy said everything about mothers, but that didn’t stop me talking about my mother to Jake. We were at Yr Hen Orsaf, the Wetherspoons in the nearest train station, which was ‘our place’. It was ‘our place’ because we rarely had money, which was entirely our own faults and not a sad fact of circumstance. We stole a lot.

Jake was buoyant and understanding. His pores were large, in a way57 that emphasised kindness, and reliability, and that he had a low tolerance for disgust. His own mother had raised him herself, and this gave him a reverence for mothers, and meant he might not ever understand the implications of my own. He tried often, with gentleness, to ask if anything really untoward had ever happened. If she ever touched me, or anything like that. This came from a lack of imagination, to think violation of this degree could only happen in the realm of sex. There are many ways to enmesh a soul into yours, to turn two people into a single alien, like vomiting simultaneously, suicide pacts, or being too knowledgeable about the smell of a daughter.

‘What are you thinking about?’ he asked. I had a tendency to get dull and quiet after a few beers.

When I was six, my mother told me to watch my thoughts. There was a prayer we said together each morning: Watch your thoughts. They become words. Watch your words. They become deeds. Watch your deeds. They become habits. Watch your habits. They become character. Watch your Character. That is your destiny.

This is hard because I grew up with a disease that made me watch my thoughts with a particular fervour, and a disease that made my thoughts particularly awful. This happened quietly and with dexterity. It was like some sort of CIA insurgency of a foreign country.

I said I was thinking about the carpet, and how its spirals looked like medieval tarot deck, imbuing the bar with a sort of old school French charm. I was really thinking about poison, and also scared that I had killed my dog. I didn’t have a dog.

‘When can I meet your family? They know about me, right?’. They did not.

My mother was very intelligent, and had orchestrated our relationship so that any man I dated would feel like ‘the other woman’. I rarely spoke of her to them, only to strangers at parties, but the dynamic loomed over regardless. It was a tumour growing teeth that threatened to pack a suitcase and leave in the dead of night, while the children were asleep. A tumour with hair, that you would pet and muss until it stopped screaming. I gave it a name like Cindy. Maybe this was the dog I needed to kill.

‘Of course they know you, Jake. Come over for dinner in two weeks. I really can’t wait for you to meet them.’ I was thinking about the sounds the dog might make when it died, and how it was an act so full of horror it makes sense that my brain forgot about it entirely. Maybe I did it while I was drunk, and maybe I even broke its small legs first. Maybe I should think about something else.

Was it Plato who said that there are more things in the firmament than can be dreamt of in our philosophy? My mother and I talked through magic, without words. We said words, but they were a vessel for the sounds we wanted to make, so we could blend in more easily with the world. We called it dolphin language, and the dolphin language was accompanied by making our hands talk and laugh while we spoke, to signal we were shifting gears. I was trilingual in this way: my words, my thoughts, my sounds, communicating different needs at different speeds.

There is something to be said for doing everything right, and Jake did everything right. He showed up to the dinner with wine, and asked attentive questions, and complimented the decor, and the food, which was delicious because my mother did not prepare it herself. She always said that cooking was disgusting, and she didn’t like the way it smells.

The table was crowded, with my brother, father, Jake, me, and my mother all squeezed in at the elbows. To save space, my mother and I shared a plate of turkey, potatoes, and greens. She cut everything up meticulously, to make sure we wouldn’t exchange germs.

‘Was it Hamlet who claimed that all sad families are sad for the same reason?’ She said this to the table, but she was speaking dolphin language to me. I thought, not now, not in front of him. She said ‘was it Hamlet?’ but I knew she was saying: I am desperately sad, and I do not want you to be in a relationship, and being near you makes me want to hurt myself. I said ‘It was Chekhov; he said something about what makes houses homes and vice versa is happiness’. But I really meant: please eat your food. I am a beautiful daughter with ugly thoughts. You are an ugly mother with a mind so beautiful that your sleep spins your dreams into silk. I will wear that silk, always, for the rest of my adult life. My hand mimed speaking when I opened my mouth, to make sure that I was understood by her.

To see Jake witness this was shameful in a benign way, like being caught thumbsucking. We finished our meal and ordered a taxi. He said it was wonderful to meet her. I said goodbye I love you but my thoughts said kill your dog and my mom heard my sounds, which were saying I am not sure we can come back from this, and she knew that I had thought this many times before.

Me and Jake had our own secret language. He kissed me on the back of the neck as we left in the elevator: are you ok? And then I bit his lip, which was to say yes, as long as you are here, though my thoughts said: some mother somewhere is going to die soon. My thoughts said: something has gone awfully wrong, irrevocably wrong.

I thought the bad thoughts I have thought many times before, the same way everything there is to say about mothers has been said before, been said before by Tolstoy. I wanted to sleep and stay awake all night in equal measure.

When we arrived to his flat, Jake took off my shirt, which meant love me love me love me only me forever. And I yelped in happiness, and my thoughts said I had already killed my dog. I didn’t even have a dog. This was some ur-dog, the platonic ideal of a dog. A dog named Cindy, with a snaggletooth and rabies and also Cindy was pregnant. Cindy would be a mother.

I had already told Jake I didn’t want to talk about it. He told me nothing happened, he was happy he was able to meet my family. But our motions were stilted and scripted. He had witnessed something I could not come back from, the sort of thing that makes you want to shave your head and read Russian novelists. My voice said I want to be alone, my body said fuck me, please. My thoughts thought that maybe I could be a pedophile with the level of shame I was operating on. Is that the sort of thing people just randomly become? This braided together into a noose I would hang myself with. There was no one here to understand the sounds underneath my words. Jake did not speak dolphin language. I moved my hand by myself, and made it smile, like my mother. This made me feel desperately alone. I was an alien who would never be able to return to his home planet. If Jake could understand dolphin language, he’d know the sounds were saying: there are more things within a family than can be dreamt of in your firmament.

Instead of hanging myself with this mind-woven rope, I used it to pull my hair up to make sure it was out of my face. Then I went to go throw up in the bathroom. I told Jake it was because I drank too much wine. But really, this is how I told him about my mother, even though Tolstoy said everything about mothers had been said before. More than anything I’d said in Yr Hen Orsaf, now he was learning about my mother. He was being given all our stories and our eccentricities and possessive joys through my retching. He knew knocking on the door to ask if I was ok would be an interruption to this information. Information I desperately needed to tell him. There was so much that was sour, and that no one would understand.

So much that could only be told in an act like this, involuntarily and after sharing a plate with a mother, my mother. My hand mimed vomiting with me: it had also known too much.

I wiped my lips and flushed the toilet. The red wine had made my vomit dark and putrid and sweet. I swigged a glass of water, and thought: everything will be ok. It’s fine.

‘I’m coming!’ I shouted to Jake through the door. It happened as a single voice, instead of a braid. This surprised me. I repeated it, just to make sure.

‘I’ll be outside in five seconds!’. There it was again: a single communication.

I opened the door and saw Jake sitting on the bed. He had gathered two glasses of water, and changed into boxers for sleeping. He asked me how I was feeling, but as I began to sleep, hoodwinked me into a tight hug instead. I pushed my mouth into his armpit and let this love wash over me. I muffled into his shoulder: probably like Tolstoy.

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Sarah Fletcher is a British-American poet researching a PhD in creative expression and pain at Aberystwyth University. Her work has appeared in The Poetry Review, Poetry London, The White Review, and other publications. PLUS ULTRA is her debut collection from Cheerio Publishing.