Foreign minds.

She doesn't understand me when I speak because I take the words she knows and give them new meaning to describe how my heart is beating, how my mind is turning. They've never meant anything else to me, but she is lost and I don't know what else to say.

When I was younger, car rides with my mother were my gateway to the meaning of life. As the trees few past she told me how it felt to have your heart break to let someone destroy it, destroy you. I was privileged, she said, because she grew up alone, with a fairy take stepmom and a coked out dad, I never knew pain the way she did, I never had to. She would pat my leg enough to make me wince, but it was never a time to complain. Nothing could ever top her stories.

It was nine days before my sixteenth birthday when the doctors told her that there was no cure, that this was just how I would be from now on, that I would live this way, in a pain she doesn't understand, with words she doesn't know. There are medications, of course, they said, drugs to dull my muscles and tell my body it's all just a bad dream. But drugs are evil, you know, so life goes on. I can't complain, though, because my body was still her's and this is not the truth she wanted. She called every hospital in Detroit, asking anyone to lie to her. And then she cried, for the first time in years. And I began the numbing, the letting go, disconnecting my mind from my brain, as she tried to numb reality. We drove home in silence.

Now when we drive, we eat the quiet. We listen to the radio she hates and count the trees. The mother too stuck in the past to see past herself, and the daughter too coked out to see past the pain. The icy tendrils will begin to take their hold around my bones and I gasp for anything make it end, but she is somewhere far away where the words she doesn't like can't reach her. We drive in silence, because for once, she's the one who can't complain.