I've been working on my memoir, Clipped Wings. Today, while searching for an old file of mine with poems from a few years ago, I came across my mother's journals... I clutched them to my breasts, crying and thanking the angels for finally showing me where it was.
This is the only thing my mother and I share, writing, or so I thought not so long ago...
As the years go by I find I'm more like her than I would care to admit.
Then again, when she was sober, she wasn't so bad.
When the flat white box, with the sadly cliche dove on the front fell into my hands, I nearly fell to pieces. I think, maybe even now I'm hanging on only by a thread. I thought I'd lost this box, you see. I'd even torn this very closet apart twice looking for it. Somehow I'd missed it both times, or maybe it hadn't been there?
This box holds the only things that I have left of my mother. My creator, this precious vessel that brought me to this plain and left in such a fragile state... What's in this box is more precious to me than any photograph, more precious than any memory I have of her surely... the contents of this box are like tiny treasures for my heart. Fragments of this beautiful broken woman who I never got to know.
We shared so much, so much that I didn't know we shared until I was an adult. Our love for poetry and writing, our sadness, the incomplete, gnawing, strangling whispers in the back of your mind that say "you aren't worthy" She had them too... she felt it too.
Thirty Two.
She was thirty two when she died, not much older than I am now... this thought always gives me an odd feeling. I expect before I know it, I'll be older to her. Will her words become childlike? Will I outgrow her more and more as the years go on?
When I open the box, I can only stare at the contents. My mother's journals and some left overs from her funeral: On the very top Poems of Inspiration compiled by Arthur Jay Green. The rest of the front page has been torn away, displaying the poem Love Answers All by an unknown author.
It's so her... her happy faces and XXX's and OOO's pointing out the significance of this poem's message. I've gone through this stuff only twice since the funeral. Now, for the first time I thumb through the pages of this book of Inspiration. She's indicated a poem called A Seed, also by an unknown author. The first stanza reads:
A wonderful thing is a seed.
The one thing deathless forever;
Forever old and forever new
Forever faithful and utterly true
fickle and faithless never.
But the last page, that's where it's tucked, the folded tattered yellow paper. The blue lines have all but faded, the black ink of the poem stands true, bold and firm...not my mother's feathery script.
Who wrote this? To My Littlest Valentine.
As much as I'd love to share this poem with you, I fear in some way to do so would be intruding on a most private moment in my mother's broken love life. But the beauty of this man, whom I think I know as the last man she was living with... it shines out at me, floods over me and I feel such remorse for her. Such loss and disappointment was her life, even in the end when things looked clear, when they were getting better... she was robbed of her chance to flourish... but I digress.
Stephan, on the one in a couple billion chance that you're reading this, she loved you. My God, she loved you. You were her cowboy.
There's a dry, scentless stem of a carnation, it's crimson petals line the flat box, scattered to pieces, now. Twelve years later, they're practically dust. Like her, like my memories of her. I can barely remember the sound of her voice, the smell of her skin. I don't remember how tall she was or how her laugh sounded... but I remember her touch. Not just the violence. No... I remember when she was most tender. I hold tight in my heart, the feeling of her dry, callused bartender hands as she softly drew her fingers over my face, coaxing me into sleep. I remember, too, the way her lips felt on my cheek, almost sucking them she she planted a kiss there. I remember what she looked like when she walked away... always walking away. Always her back.
Several handouts from the funeral service are here in this box, wrapped in a shiny gold ribbon, they have the cheesy dove on them too. I note the location, name, commit it to memory for safe keeping, for when I have the courage to return. Beneath these items lay her journal. It's torn and tattered, duct tape makes up the binding and all of the pages are loose and falling out.
The beautiful angel which once graced its cover is fading, only a few flecks of golden glitter light her translucent skin now. I turn it over in my hands, her angel eyes even seem old, sad and distant, hoping for her charge to write a spell that I can understand.
It's like magic for me, you see? A book of spells. Everything I have always wanted to know, every answer to every unasked question is here, in this flat white box... if only I knew how to find it.
An envelope, a folded piece of cigarette carton, on the back is a poem... a photograph with no name, only a date... small phone numbers and addresses are scattered throughout the book. So many answers with misguided direction. If I had a potion to allow me to talk to the dead I'd gladly drink it.
A sweet nectar to bring forth such pain and fear but the relief to follow would be more than I can imagine.
Her words are haunting and at times I feel I'm looking at my own writing, my own words... how can I feel her so close now that she's gone? Why is it that in death I know her more than I ever could have hoped to in life? She was like a hard, cold wind, biting and fierce, unable to be caught... contained.
Drive Fast, Live Hard
Live Free, Die Young
I miss you.
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