My mother, the way she bleached her soul was like how she pours clothes into our roller in the morning, like how she rubbed the tiny dots off her white dress in the afternoon.

She was expecting a martyrdom, even though she was already deep in it. She was preparing a kneel to the woman and her son on the wall.

I pointed to the woman, said, “Mother, this is you”, I pointed to the child in her arms, then I opened my mouth, the things I wanted to say failed to escape out.

The woman in the painting was dressed in a bright red gown, which made her look like a wound from a distance.

"I finished my homework, can I go out ?"

My mother put down the iron and took me with her.

We went to church a lot. Besides that, we also went to the market and the salon. When I think of church, immediately I associated with mother, our church, a pale white womb, a hole left by God in the earth.

My mother talked to strangers there, and I continued to explore this place I had visited many times before.

The Madonna in the shrine on the left is more beautiful than the last one.

Her golden tears fell like melted iron dripped on my heart, a few swords passed through her ceramic heart and a few beams of light burst out of her lime skin. The candlelight captivated my eyes as if they were full of tears, the intense sorrow found me, thought I was controlled, I climbed up, stood on tiptoe, hugged her, and tried to kiss her tears away.

I kiss the statue of a woman, imagine how she has been beaten, carved, burnt and dyed, I want to weep gorgeously, I want to have a face that shines. I knew what she was trying to tell me, and I could only hear it if I leaned close to her lips, so I held her tight, hoping it would ease her pain.

But they separated me from her. When I got home, my mother took off my white dress. She said there were too many ashes on it.

Lost and found, and I've grown up. I never forgotten the statue, and when I look up at the spinning ball of disco lights, when I see the golden liquid burning in the cup, I think of the statue I kissed when I was a child. My mother also cried because of me, she could not understand why I would walk away from the church. For mother, every contact to the world was undoubtedly a hurt to me. She saw my wounds, crying tears of gold. I told my mother that I might just take a long detour, and that at last I would walk back to the sacred house.

I think of my mother because an unknown being lived in my stomach, without asking me, without warning me, in the body of a human being, it was constantly transforming me, the intruder was my child, I was its mother, and I did not want it to live here.

I kept praying that one of these days I would just stumble or eat something wrong, but none of these events happened, and all I could feel was that it was taking up more and more of my space, that my body no longer belonged to me. The nightmare had taken control of me, the angel within me was restless, thought it was all punishment for indulgence. This angel was here to punish me, it was fighting for control with me, I was fighting with myself each day, fighting with the divine. Every victory was the shame of blasphemy, every defeat was the pain of incompetence.

In always, the winner is the devil of the war in my mind.

I walked straight into this mess of mine and lied down under the command of the devil, I felt a thousand swords thrust into my body, and the holiness within me burst and escape. In the flames of hell, golden tears burned, and it didn’t belong to the light of heaven, but to the horns of the devil, who wanted to take my child away from me, and I, I asked them to do it.

This shall be my martyrdom.

I thought of Madonna in childhood on my way to her. he may not recognize me, it is really a long detour, I think, maybe a little too long.

I want to bleach my soul to wash away all the excess color, and at last only the whiteness of memory remains. I asked her: Why can't I clean it? Will I ever get clean again?

She looked down at me and said, "Because your soul is originally stained, if it becomes pure white, it must be dyed. You know heaven would refuse those who don’t keep their original heart. Your soul is stained with whiteness."

I looked back, the tears of her shining in the candlelight.