A Different Sort of Dawn

The new year came quietly for me. Open sky and sun, a light breeze chasing the summer heat away as my father and I walked among the flowers of the park and admired the art show displays. Later in the evening, there was a pleasant dinner at a nice little spot out in the neighborhoods away from the hustle of the city. It’s different with just the two of us, but we laugh when we remember her and it’s nice to share the memories without the pall of grief hanging over us.

At one point I tipped my glass to no one in particular and smiled when others looked at me oddly. A small gesture just to show I remembered, even if there was no fanfare to follow it...

Disconcerting Dreams of Her

I’m not certain I like it here. The clouds get snagged on the mountains and the rains and rolling thunder are just out of reach, visible but too far to hear or smell or feel. I suppose it wouldn’t make much difference anyway. I mostly sit inside with the shades drawn pretending I’m not here. I had forgotten the roughness of the place where my brother lives. I don’t like to go out alone in this part of town and the neighbors are loud and unstable. But we go out in the evenings to better parts of town when my brother is in the mood for it and the company is worth putting up with the broken shower and the small space. All in all, it isn’t so bad.

But then there are the dreams and the small anxious thing inside me that paces about because I don’t know what to do about them. It is the third dream now, when she has come and said she was coming back. Coming back? What does that mean? I look between the slats of the big window that can see the clouds being torn on the mountain tops. High above the desert, moisture gathers and threatens to fall. An empty threat. My mind turns back to the dreams. What do you mean you’re coming back? You’ve gone west, mother…there is no coming back from that journey.

In the last dream there was a strange resurrection and I think she wants to see my brother. I would work towards that, but he can’t see her because he doesn’t believe so there is no point to it. Then I think that must not be it at all because she has used the guise of others to say the same things—specifically the guise of a person I respect and trust and love— and if this is just about my brother, that doesn’t fit. What are you trying to say? What do you want me to do? Are you trying to say you are leaving the west? Are you trying to say you intend to try again at life? I won’t know you if you come back. I say. You’ll be different.  

Wind picks up and dust swirls… then all is calm and bright. The storm stays on the mountain. My mother stays in the west.

I don’t understand. 

Written After Yet Another Magazine Boasting "20 Ways to Slim for Summer" and Half A Dozen Mini-Articles Blaming Cancer Victims for Being Those People With "Poor Lifestyle and Habits"

(As if you can fend off cancer with berries and Pilates. 

As if eating salad and walking twenty minutes a day will somehow prevent the horrible gasping death that comes at the end of hellish "treatment"...but I digress...)

I’m never going to be delicate like them

Short and slight

The best I can hope for

Is a less chunky kind of tall

I’m never going to be free of hair

Or moles, or birthmarks, or varicose veins

My teeth will never be white

Even if I brush and brush

Until I brush them away

And my feet will never be soft or kissable

They have the hard skin of climbing rocks as a child and wearing boots as the rebellious teen, summer heat be damned

There are so many things I will never be

And so many people who will never approve

I look at the thin girls, the gorgeous girls

The perfect skin girls, the white teeth girls

And the girls with kissable feet

I see them smile, so happy in their digital world.

But then I meet them on the streets of the world I live in…

And they say the same things I say here.

Because no one has it all at once.

And even when they do it isn't enough.

There is always one more pound to lose, one more sun spot to laser away, one more shade of white brighter, one more stray hair to pluck, one more cream to smear in some place that god never intended cream to go.

The immortals on the magazine pages and the billboards and the flashing ads that run down the sides of the browser window are pieced together from dozens of models on an LCD screen.

Out here in the less digital world we are only one person each and no flower which has lived in the wild gardens of the real comes away with every petal and every leaf intact.

Unless it lives a life under glass and then, when time is cruel as time tends to be, under knife.

I know the truth now, after years of worrying and crying over a reflection that has never been and never will be “wrong” any more than any other reflection anywhere else:  I will never be healthy enough for the doctors; I will never be beautiful enough for the critics.

I will never groom and eat and drink and sleep and move to their exact specifications because I am not a computer model—not a picture, not an average, not a statistic—I am alive and living is messy business for those who commit to it. 

Fishing for Pride

 “Hey, long time no hear,” he says with mild enthusiasm. Then he launches into an inventory of every minute thing which has happened to him since the last time I called…which was a long time ago because these life inventories of his are tedious to listen to. I can’t stand that kind of banal substitute for actual emotional connection anymore.  Oh, I understand doing it every now and then—we all have those moments when we just need someone to act like they care what paperwork we got dumped with this week—but time after time our conversations start this way.

In Memory of April 30th to July 14th in the World After Mom

There’s the final medical procedure on the last Monday of April and the looming appointment for my GRE in early May. There’s also the end of the school year fast approaching and the plane tickets for far off Albuquerque pinned to the fridge door to remind me that June means freedom. Everything moves quickly but in slow motion and my writing is almost as fractured as my thoughts. I find myself with lots of snippets but nothing with enough substance for a proper blog post. It is a state of incoherence that I experience every year at this time.

 Every year except last year.

It’s been almost a year to the day since the phone call that changed everything. Almost a year to the day since I abandoned the last weeks of school like they meant nothing and drove home to be with her. Almost a year to the day since my world collapsed inward and became about her and only her. Almost a year to the day since the Summer of Mom.

I have a goal this summer: to spend as little time alone as possible. A month with my brother, then a month with my father. They work, obviously, so I will have the days to myself, but the evenings will be filled with the presence of family. I am not giving myself so much as a single sunset to just stare at the ceiling in an empty apartment and pine for the voice I will never hear again.

I’ve always somewhat loved the happy chaos at the end of the school year. Last year I had to give it up to do the most important and difficult thing I had ever done. This year I am beyond grateful that it has returned to me. I am overbooked, foolishly optimistic, and blissfully frantic. So though I know my silence may look disconcerting it is not altogether unhappy. As the one year anniversaries pass—that of her diagnosis and, later this summer, of her passing—I am not opposed to being too preoccupied to think on it much.