In my mother’s dimple (2023)

This is a long-form essay of the script for the film of the same name found here

You contain an archive of me.  A sensory archive, accessed as I gaze at your peaceful face as you sleep, as I bury my face in your soft hair, as you throw yourself into my arms when we have been apart.

Only I can read the archive of me, and only I know where to find it, for it is my own endless space, but as a part of you, it is infinitesimally small, contained within my mother’s dimple.  And whilst the archive may form the foundations of the you that you become, it is malleable; it can be stretched and twisted - you could squish it down into a box and pack it away.  For you get to decide on even the me within you.

At the front of the archive are memories, precious and quick to mind.  The weight of your tiny foot in my hand as you breastfed.  The downy fur on your back when I towelled you dry.  The caress of your hand as you cupped my cheek and the gentle brush of your breath in my ear as you whispered your secrets.

Beneath these is a clearer indication of my presence in your body.  For the first few months of your life, every cell of you was me, sustained by my blood and then my milk and those cells exist within you still.  For we are chimeric – your cells passed to me as mine did to you.  We contain one another.

And within my cells, symbiotically existing in your body, my DNA, a part of me immortal… but perhaps it will end with you; I have no need to live forever, do with it as you wish.  But I search the archive for its ambivalent presence, knowing that it contains the flaws of my own body, shaped forever by the trauma of my childhood – a nervous system primed for panic, an observation deck always searching for the iceberg.  I do my best to pull any scrap of this from the archive and burn it, knowing that one day, I may come across indestructible evidence of my body’s failure, of my parents’ bodies' failure, of their parents and those before that.

But there is joy in seeing my face in yours, in a world where I had no-one to reflect me back.  When my resemblance to my own mother is so slight – even her dimple skipped me to find a home in your sweet cheek.  And now I have you, my mirror image, a sense of home, of root, of belonging.  But it’s a funhouse mirror, my image is distorted and the differences are glorious.  Our faces may be the same but your smile… you smile with such a solid sense of who you are; I don’t see the great hole in me reflected in you, and I am glad of it.  And seeing your full-bodied solidity inspires me to explore my own archive.  For you have given me the key to see things anew, to move from replaying and replaying through my child’s eye to stepping outside of that body and seeing the child I was through the eyes of the mother I am now, venting the hate and anger I have suppressed and finding release.

Deeper still within the archive of me within you are others - those who left their impressions and shaped who I am.  Some are responsible for my survival, evidenced by your being here at all.  But then there is the one who carved the great hole which I try to stuff and stuff with silky threads so that it doesn’t touch you.  But it does, of course.  I am looking, always, to see if, despite my efforts to protect you from it, as our bodies press together, you are forming the perfect inverse to my great hole, a great protrusion, to push me away one day and shed yourself of my encircling arms.

The you and me that is us is formed of a series of love letters sent back and forth.  And if the archive in my mother’s dimple in your sweet cheek contains those that I have written, then within me are those you have written.  An archive of you.  And I cherish it;  I would submerge myself in its inky depths so ”we” fuse into “I” once more, but it is becoming a mystery to me, as you become a mystery to me, as ”we” separate into “you” and “I”, the line between us ever-clearer.  As you turn your back to me and walk into the world and I remain behind with a mix of joy and agony.  But it has repaired me nonetheless, the archive of you for it is the best of me, you are the best of me.  I look at the you within me and I see that there is something good, a good object, a love that I nurtured with every ounce of my will and I am not so unloved, so unloveable as I once thought.

And so we are archives of each other.  Distributed selves, fluid and leaking, transforming one another at the ecotones, swirling in the eddies.  Distributed knowledge in embodied archives that shall never be one but always apart, unknowable to all but the person to whom they pertain and even then, incomplete without the content of the other.  And in the vastness of you, there are already growing archives of other loves, and of course, others will contain their own archive of you.  And one day, perhaps you will create within you another face like our own, and we shall search for ourselves in it together, and perhaps we will find one another there again, in my mother’s dimple.