Night 11

Dear Jornal,

Mommy.

Death, purposeless.

Munchies.

Where is my vape? Thoughts pass through my mind like a highway. I am quickly 30, my youth already a ghost. I should get a cigar from my local DG.

Then the song plays, and all the yearning sits at the edge of my eyelids. “Have a baby with…” Twelve years ago. Four years ago. All the women I could have had a baby with. I would still be the me listening to this song. I think I just needed a trigger to write.

I woke up with my mother on my mind, a little girl in the streets of Kingston, trying to remember her own name. She can’t. She runs and hugs my leg. I whisper, happy. It’s Sunday night, 8:52, and she’s probably sitting on a church bench, alone. My mother has known so much aloneness in her brief, beautiful life, from abandonment to orphanage to isolation and hostage to marriage and half of her children.

My seventh-grade science teacher, Mr. Blackwood, gave us an assignment on family trees. I’m having a flash of doing that paper under candlelight. Shit. I put my mom’s name down, and the man went berserk about aliases. That was my mom’s name. What if I am supposed to find her name, to find her?

My life is intricately linked to my mother. In some ways, she is the silent question to most of my questions. I have never given enough time to read the answers that live inside her. Living with her, I learned how to hide a question with an answer. That is how we communicate.

We have both wounded each other, so we use our umbilical cord to speak. She sends it in meals and folded socks. I answer in new dresses. We sit across from each other and let a movie refract our sense of being human. She is gravity, both the kind that steadies a baby learning to walk and the kind that pulls a bison over a cliff.

I love my mother’s laughter. It’s funny how we never take inventory of the things we are loaned. I watched my father’s muscles gracefully melt into bones, arms that once picked me up, hoisted me over wires, pulled me from ditches, and made me grab the sky. But like a father’s arms, my mother’s laughter is made of millions of light beams, swollen bubbles that pop a perfect honey-lemon gold in the halls of your ears. You have to smile when her laughter comes to a pause, that last flash of lightning. My brother knows how to coax her laughter. My dad does too.

The little girl in the dream felt like a younger me. There is a painting on my wall in my apartment, my mom’s hand wrapped warmly around me on my first birthday, my eyes sealed with innocence. I must have been absorbing strength by the zillions. My mother’s skin glows with earthy fullness.

When I think of my mother in the fullness of her name, I conjure this painting. This photograph is what she saved herself as. It’s how my hand rests on her arm. We are both holding onto an airplane and a telephone. I hate corny foreshadowing, but this painting stands as witness.

My mom holds one end of the telephone to my ear. I look off. She looks deadpan into the camera. She is radiant. Absolutely beautiful, young, and endless.