My room feels oddly warm compared to the usual frigidity that takes over the second the last ray of sunlight passes below my window. Maybe it is because I lost the remote for my space heater that sits crammed on my work desk alongside old receipts and a million different lip glosses that are all slightly the wrong shade. But I wonder if the stress and worry — floating around in my head, tangling with each other until they sink and sit heavy, weighing my mind down — are actually keeping me warm. They tuck me in the same way my mother would as I jokingly squirmed around, laughing hours past my bedtime the night before my first day of kindergarten — or on nights that I’d wake up from a nightmare as she’d coax me back to sleep. She’d push the corners of the thick comforter under me, smiling, only for me to jump out of the bed the second she laid down next to me. She’d put her arms over me, pretending to hold me down as I’d laugh and slip out of her grasp. The thought of those nights still leaves a pit in my stomach, the size of one from the mangoes my aunt used to cut while my cousins, brother and I sat around her scraping the flesh off the skins as the strings of sweet, ripe mango stuck themselves between our teeth on a dry evening in Bangalore. We’d eat the entirety of the mangoes my aunt had picked in one sitting, only to run around smudging the stickiness everywhere we went, leaving our mark on a house we’d never return to, or even think about, until now.  
I think about these nights often. I think about how far away they are, far from my apartment in Ann Arbor, far from my 20s, far from the anxiety that controls my every move and thought. I think about my innocence, when I worried about whether my mother would remember to pack a Ziploc of Goldfish for my lunch that day, or if the strings of mango would ever come out of my teeth or if they’d stay stuck forever allowing me to taste a hint of that sweetness for the rest of my life. Where the only times I’d feel the iciness of a cold tear streaking my cheeks were when play-fighting with my brother went a little too far, using my mother’s metal ladles as swords and lids as shields, jumping from couch to couch, causing tiny rips that my mother would only notice years later, or when I’d fall of my bicycle from riding around my driveway too fast while waiting for both my brother and father to come out so we could ride through our long subdivision in circles. 
But now everytime my eyes water, my mother watches me as I embrace the last bit of warmth on my cheek before the first cold tear spills out while we drive home from Ann Arbor. She watches for a few moments before asking me where the little girl went, where her little girl went. She ignores the wide smile sharpied onto my face with her old lip liner, and notices the loss of my dimple, the paler undertone to my face that you would imagine to only appear under the whitest of lights, the twitch on the corner of my lips from forcing the smile for far too long, the same twitch behind every school picture day photo. For a while when she asked, I’d ignore her, rolling my eyes and tuning her voice out to whatever song I was currently fixating on blasting through my headphones at a volume high enough that my mother could hum along. I refused to openly admit that she left. 
But on nights as warm as tonight, as warm as I felt laying swaddled in my bed before kindergarten, I can’t deny her absence. And on nights where the sky is surprisingly clear enough to see the lightened stars that I’d draw all over the walls that my mother has not painted over 17 years later, I ask myself the same. I ask myself where the mismatched polka dot socks and the pink cheetah print comforter, the daydreaming about my future as a singer even though the voice memos on my mother’s phone proved that I had one of the worst voices imaginable, the spilled glitter and paint stains on the carpets that I’d tried covering with a mountain of my toys to hide from my mother after ignoring her suggestion to put one of the old newspapers down that piled in our den, the just dance and the weird and gross obsession with eating Bournvita powder instead of mixing it with milk all went. I ask myself where the laughter went. Where the constant talking about everything and nothing without a care in the world, the hope of a perfect future life and the genuine bliss shown through the natural cheeriness on my cheeks all went. I am told she remains inside of me, that she has watched me grow up, becoming someone greater than what her little mind could have ever imagined. But is this what growing up is? Is this better than she could have ever imagined? Applying fake pink joy on my cheeks with a broken blush palette so people don’t notice the loss of my childhood? Waking up in a constant haze of stress mixing with the fog of worry and fear of what would happen the second I step outside my room? Being stripped of who you truly are until only a sense of hopelessness remains, hopelessness that is so ingrained into you, that you don’t even realize it’s there until you look back at your life on a random warm starry Thursday night?

If she lives inside of me, why can’t I find her? Why can’t she hear me when I desperately call out her name, begging for her, when she is the one voice I need to hear? Why can’t I undress every one of my layers, of thick clothes, of battered skin, of hidden flesh, and find her, hiding somewhere crouching in the corner? She has left me, and yet I am glad. She is safe from the deadliness of life, the darkness that it has injected, the dread it has caused. She is safe from the world stripping her of her innocence, stealing her from her dreams, staining her with scars. 
Wherever she is, she is safe from me.