No Woman No Cry/Nao Chore Mais

A Short Preface: The Title is based on the Bob Marley/Gilberto Gil songs - the Gil song is a remake of the Marley song. Since some of you know a bit about my life, I feel it necessary to say that while this is very loosely based on my life, it is fiction, and in no way resembles my life closely enough to be called autobiographical. Also, for the record, I take the privacy of my relationships very seriously, despite my blogging habit. I wrote this to practice writing a short story that actually followed some kind of plot, since that is one of my greatest challenges as a writer. So its very much a work in progress that I might use as material to turn into something else later on.
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"What does it matter? We are dead to you", she said, turning away with a flash of her hair. In her hand, she held a remote control that was poised like a projectile missile, ready to attack the first who dared to approach her thinning body.
"This is real life Mom. Not some kind of telenovella." The voice was flat, like underbaked bread.
"Where do you think they get telenovellas from? Real life! This is real life!"
She laughed. "This is your life, not mine."
"And what is yours then?"
"Well, let's see...I think right now I'm going to take my bag and go fuck my Arab boyfriend. Then I'm going to go to a bar and get wasted, maybe a little high. You like it when I fuck Arabs mom, don't you?"
The remote missed its mark. She laughed. "You should be careful about throwing things. One of these days I might learn how to throw back. But hey, at least you're not hitting me anymore, right?"
The door slammed behind her. The night was cool, and she could feel the fall air ruffling her brown hair against her cheeks. She pulled her jacket tighter around her. The streets were full of laughing people coming back from the opera. The women were wearing heels, their hair done up in sleek bones her hands had never seemed to master. The men were wearing suits and the smiles of those who expect to get laid. She walked up the steps of Lincoln Center to look at the waterfall - the water was shaped like mermaids today, and she could see the waves dancing, showing off for a crowd of tourists to enamored of the photos they would put on Facebook to pay any attention to the way one stream was showing off her liquid-clear hips, while another bobbed her thighs. As for the opera-lovers, they were too enamored of each other to feel the life in the circles of water that stood in the center of the plaza. A breeze came up, and she rushed into the Starbucks across the street, where she ordered a vanilla latte, opened her laptop, and began pouring all of her venom onto Facebook. The flatness of her voice in real life was replaced by a virtual scream. She looked at her watch. Half an hour and she'd head over to Jerry's.

By the time she did so, she was feeling slightly calmer, as if her anger were a snake bite that Facebook had sucked the venom out of her, "the way Roberto Benigni sucks that woman's thigh in "Life is Beautiful"", she thought, feeling herself grow slightly horny - which on the whole, was not an inappropriate feeling to have on the way to one's boyfriend, she reminded herself. When she got to Jerry's however, she could tell from the minute he opened the door that he was pissed.
"Did you write about me on my blog?" he asked.
"Yeah. But no on reads that blog - its just like, my friends, and you."
"Oh good. Because it's not like I know your friends or anything, not like I might be embarrassed."
"I'm sorry, ok? I won't do it again."
"What the hell? That stuff was in cyberspace - who knows who read it - you can't just take that back! Is our relationships some kind of refuse that you need to shit out onto the world-wide web in your constant spasms of vebal diarhea?"
"Jesus, Jerry - that is probably the most disgusting metaphor I've ever heard. And I write porn for a living - I've read the Marquis de Sade, for God's sake!"
"Well I'm sorry my metaphor isn't up to your literary standards."
"That's not what I meant - I" she sat down on a chair and buried her head in her hand, "This isn't working. I don't know what this is - but it isn't working - and I want it to work, because I love you, but -" She was crying. He walked over to her and stroked her hair. "Shh!", he said, "Shh!" But they knew it was over, and when she walked out of his apartment half an hour later, she felt oddly free - and still slightly horny. "Damn. We should have at least had break-up sex", she thought.

When she got home, her mother was washing dishes. "What's wrong?" she asked.
"Nothing."
"Don't nothing me. I'm your mother. I know. Somebody hurt my baby." With that, she began to walk around the kitchen, soapy knife in hand, crying hysterically, "Somebody hurt my baby. Somebody hurt my baby.", like some sort of mantra.
"God, this woman should be meds", the daughter thought, but she pulled her mother to her breasts, and stroked her graying hair, whispering, "Shh! Nao chore Mae, nao chore", and she could feel the slight shivering of the head beneath her hands. She wondered if this was what Jerry had felt like, stroking the hair of a woman he no longer cared about in the way he had before, but she also knew that when she walked out of her mother's apartment, she would not be free of the bond that tied them - she would never be free, never move on to find a new mother, a new body to keep her warm at night. She felt her body letting go of her mother's body. "I'm going to bed", she said.
"You're my life. I don't sleep at night - I stay up, worrying about you." The words were feirce in their passion - "but what is passion if not posession", the daughter wondered? She walked away, not because she wanted to ignore, but because she could not think of an honest response.
"Frederico Fellini once said "Happiness is being able to tell the truth without hurting others", she thought bitterly, as she lay down and cried.