The other day I started to feel that unbearable loneliness creeping up on me, this is starting to happen more often, and I panicked and called my friend. We went to the forest and smoked a joint then to a bodega where we had a beer. A middle-aged Russian woman was sitting in a booth next to us and she turned around to talk to us. She was obviously an alcoholic, and for a brief moment I wondered if I was staring into my future. That if I don't move on from this loss, I will end up drunk and alone in some dingy bodega in the suburbs.

She drunkenly asked if I was adopted (my mother was black and my father is white and I live in a predominantly white country, so I am often questioned about my heritage). I used to not mind the question or people's curiosity but I realized that now it will grimly remind me that my mother is dead, and that I am now going to have to awkwardly tiptoe around this fact. I dread the idea of having to confess to a stranger that my mother is dead, it puts such a shadow over any conversation, so I say nothing about her being gone, which feels like a lie. It makes me cold inside and my gestures become stiff.

The Russian, not knowing that my mom is dead, tells me I look just like her mother who also passed away. She starts to look for a picture, but keeps interrupting her search with comments and questions (she's pretty drunk). She tells us that just the other day she saw two other girls that looked like her mother. I return to the previous thought that this sad woman, who keeps seeing her mother in girls she meets could be me twenty years down the line, if I allow myself to be truly broken. Maybe it's already too late.

The Russian finds the picture. I look nothing like her mother, which makes the situation all the more tragic.