Isabella

"You bitch! I should've never given birth to you!"

The harsh words lashed like a whip across the receiver, each syllable flaying deep into the tender recesses of my soul.

My mother's venom, her seething hatred...it was all too familiar. Too painfully, exquisitely familiar.

I could practically smell the cheap whiskey fumes burning off her tongue, singeing the air with its putrid vapors. But it was her festering self-loathing that truly scorched me, searing invisible gashes across my psyche.

Breathe.

Count to ten.

Breathe.

My therapist's soothing voice said at the back of my head.

Gloria Gomez, the faded star - the ex-soap opera actress whose Venusian beauty had graced millions of television screens during her heyday. In that moment, my mind catapulted back over two decades, to the night everything changed. The night an innocent was ravaged, a dream brutalized into a Whiskey Tango nightmare.

Gloria had been 23, fresh off a steamy guest stint on the hit Spanish soap El Espejo de la Traición. Every glossy inch of her had screamed crossover sensation - the smoldering Latina bombshell who would seduce the entire English-speaking world.

Fame's sweet oblivion went straight to her head that fateful night. Awash in compliments and Patrón, she gave herself to some random, faceless man in a dimly-lit corner of the hotel suite's hellpit. Just another disposable plaything for the rising starlet to discard like a drained bottle of cheap bubbly.

Weeks later, the positive test awakened her from that delirious fantasy. La Estrellita - the shining ingenue daughter of a conservative Cubano family - was now an unwed, sauce-soaked pariah carrying a bastard embryo. A goddamn mutant cockroach gestating in her immaculate womb.

The dream was over before it began. All her hopes and delusions, incinerated in an instant like a millionaire's campfire from hell.

"Look at me now..." she gurgled through the phone in a whiskey-soaked keen. "A broke old lush..."

I pictured her wizened face angled towards the cracked mirror, mascara sludge leaking from her jaundiced eyes. Middle-aged but looking triple-damned decades older, courtesy of the countless drunken berations she'd endured from herself.

"...paying half my trailer rent through these plastic f*****g bottles!"

I gripped the phone tighter as Gloria's drunken tirade continued. The scathing words sliced deeper with each venom-laced syllable.

"You selfish little puta!" she slurred. "How dare you keep what's rightfully mine?"

I knew exactly what she was raving about - the modest inheritance Abuela had left me after she passed last week. $50,000 that my devout Catholic grandmother had squirreled away from decades of penny-pinching to ensure I wouldn't be saddled with the mistakes of her daughter and son-in-law.

"That money should go towards paying off Dario's debts!" Gloria howled like a wounded animal. "Not lining the pockets of an ungrateful bruja like you!"

My chest tightened as I imagined my so-called stepfather blowing every last cent on poker, booze, and God knows what other vices.

"Abuela wanted me to use it for a downpayment on a house," I said evenly, struggling to maintain my composure. "To get out on my own, away from...this."

"Oh, so now the little bastard wants to abandon her mami? Just like every man in my life?"

There it was - the self-pitying martyr act that made my eyes roll so hard they practically did 360s. As if she wasn't the prime architect of her own misery.

"That bruja never accepted me!" she wailed. "Just because I had the audacity to get myself knocked up before walking down the aisle!"

Despite Abuela's staunch traditionalism, I knew her rejection of my mother ran far deeper than some puritanical notions of sexual morality. It cut straight to the bone of Gloria's lifelong selfishness, her obsession with chasing fame while forsaking anything resembling maternal responsibility.

"She knew you'd squander every penny just like you did your so-called 'career'!" I fired back, unable to resist defending Abuela's memory. "Drink it all away until you drowned in your own vomit!"

The roar of her outraged howls rattled my eardrum. In my mind's eye, I could see her pudgy arm windmilling around, likely hurling objects through our trailer's perpetually dilapidated interior.

"You ungrateful whore! Without me, you'd be nothing! Nada! Just a bastard child eating out of dumpsters and spreading your legs en la calle like every other squatmuerta!"

I opened my mouth to protest, but she'd already hung up, abandoning me to the ricocheting silence.

Sinking to the floor, I hugged my knees to my chest and took a series of deep, steadying breaths.

I looked around at the disaster area that was my cramped apartment. Piles of unwashed dishes teetered precariously in the sink while laundry overflowed from the hamper like a sad, stained fabric waterfall. My room was equally chaotic - a whirlwind of discarded clothes, crumpled papers, and other detritus scattered across every surface.

In that moment, the squalid chaos surrounding me felt like a perfect metaphor for the messiness of my life. No matter how hard I tried to straighten things up, upheaval always found a way to blow everything apart again.

My mind started racing, thoughts pinging around like a demented pinball as I tried to process Gloria's latest toxic download. I needed a distraction, anything to drown out the malicious echoes rattling through my brain.

Instinctively, I reached for my phone, that trusty pacifier that promised soothing digital numbness. A few taps and swipes brought me to my Inst*gram feed, where I started mindlessly flicking through the barrage of photos and videos. Puppies frolicking, artery-clogging food pics, influencers shilling detox teas from their latest tropical getaway - the empty calorie content provided a merciful respite.

Then, I saw it. An image that caused my heart to plummet into my stomach like a lead weight.

It was a photo from my ex Theo's story. He was kissing some skinny blonde, their lips mashed together in a sloppy display. The geotag showed they were at a club downtown, no doubt getting drunk off overpriced bottle service.

"#loveofmylife," the caption mocked in electric pink lettering.

A hollowness spread through my chest as I studied the intimate moment captured in unforgiving pixels. Theo's hands gripped the nameless girl's waist possessively, exactly how he used to hold me before everything went to shit.

Finally, I arrived at the last message Theo had sent over a week ago:

[Theo: This isn't working out. You have too much stuff going on with your family, your therapy, your meds. I need someone with less baggage and drama in their life. Peace out.]

I read and re-read those dismissive words, each pass driving the rusted blade deeper into my core. Even after all this time, all the self-work and healing, that callous rejection still stung with a lingering, radioactive ache.

With a frustrated groan, I locked my phone and flung it across the room, watching it bounce off the grimy carpet with a dull thud. Theo was ancient history now, just another body in the mass grave of relationships I'd sabotaged through my inherited trauma and self-destructive wiring.

Yet I couldn't shake the image of him slobbering all over that vapid rando, their Insta-perfect PDA mocking the intimacy Theo and I once shared. His parting words replayed on a tormenting loop, each repetition cementing my identity as the unstable, unlovable "crazy" ex no sane guy would stick around for.

The sad truth was, on some level, I hadn't deserved Theo. For those blissful six months, he'd been the only stable force tethering me to some semblance of normalcy amid the perpetual chaos. Not a long stint, but a milestone compared to the combustible flings that preceded him.

I'd clung to him with a desperation bordering on smothering, basking in the illusion that his steady presence could somehow fortify the crumbling levees of my psyche. But inevitably, my issues - the trauma, the ADHD, the self-sabotaging thought spirals - came roaring back with a vengeance that Theo wasn't equipped to handle.

So I stayed, as the passion calcified into resentment and codependency. Numbing myself with our toxic bond until the high dissolved into the harsh chemical comedown. Deluding myself into thinking I could MacGyver together a solid relationship from my broken pieces.

Because deep down, I understood an inescapable truth - a broken person can only attract another broken person. We're drawn to the flashes of beautifully calculated chaos mirrored in each other's shattered stained-glass lives.

For a few fragile moments, the jagged shards seem to align in a cosmic kaleidoscope of perfection. But one errant twitch, one microscopically misaligned edge, and the whole mosaic shatters, shredding any hope of lasting fulfillment.

My phone buzzed. Kat's goofy selfie flashed across the screen and I sighed, reluctantly swiping to answer.

"Hey girl, what's good?" Her sunny voice immediately lifted my mood a few notches. Kat had this magical ability to be relentlessly positive without coming across as annoyingly chipper.

"Not much, just...you know." I didn't need to elaborate.

Kat was more than familiar with the toxic tornado that was my relationship with Gloria.

"Ugh, I'm sorry babe. That woman is straight-up venomous." There was a pause as I heard her take a sip of something, surely fueling up with an iced coffee or one of her trendy energy drinks. "You know what? We're going out tonight. No arguments!"

I opened my mouth to protest, but Kat's rapid-fire pep talk was already in full swing. "Seven o'clock, I'm swinging by to pick you up. Wear something sexy but comfortable - we're gonna dance our asses off and forget about all the drama for one night, 'kay?"

A smile tugged at the corners of my mouth. Kat's enthusiastic warmth was practically radioactive at times, but that's exactly what made her such a soothing balm whenever I felt beaten down by life. She was the big sister I never had, always ready with a night of carefree escapism whenever I needed it most.

"You're not taking no for an answer, are you?"

"Nope!" she chirped confidently. "See you at seven, b*tch!"