Take me back to the start

Ah, today has been a crying day. I don't know what it is. Well, I do. It started in therapy. My therapy just gets more and more emotional. Every week, I come in thinking "Let's talk about time management or job searching or how I feel about my Friday night gone wrong," but NO! It's only deepest darkest fears and humiliations, the words that I've never spoken to another soul, or even admitted to myself, those are the only words that get spoken in that tiny office. Today, I even made my therapist cry. That felt special.

It's coming up on the one year anniversary of my mother's death. It was nearly a year ago, a Tuesday, that we laid you down in the orange dirt, beneath the flowers, the second grave of the day. J.'s brand new suit jacket ripping at the seams, humiliating. the clumsy words of the obituary, our favorite line marred, and dearest "Myra Whiston." It was only a month ago that they finally covered your eternal dwelling place with grass. your burial, a comic production. Nearly a year ago that we drowned our sorrows in bottles and cans, baptized our hearts into that yet barely understood world of perpetual inebriation. Oh, how we grew to know it in the months that followed. Oh, how it has wrecked us. Words unspoken. Mother, I know that we forgot you long before you left. I know that now. What is there to say? Do apologies reach to where you are? and what are they worth? Is it a consolation to know that I had no idea? We are criminals, we your children. I know that now. Yes I, your forever ally, count myself as one of them. Is that guilt, pressing into my back? It is. But I let it be. And it goes by unnoticed, most of the time. My yoke. Are these words that will make it into that tiny office? They are. They will.

What is there to say? I could never speak to you as clearly in life as in death. In death, I speak to you as to God, ethereal, detached, without context, and not bothered by a damaged mind, no pleasantries, no forbidden territory. I am an open book for you now, Mother. And I mythologize you for my own comfort. Mother, Goddess, standing by to ease me through my suffering, silent as always, but with outstretched arms and open ears, in place of the weak arms and selective ears I remember. But I know my Goddess no more connects me to you than my prayers to my imaginary God connect me to the true god. Another of my crimes - I don't speak to you, because it is too difficult. I leave you alone and wandering the corridors of my dreams, abandoned, lost. I have my Goddess now. wounded in all the right places, but ever available. I hold her close.

I wish that you could see me when I'm
flying in my dreams
the way I laugh there way up high
the way I look when I fly
the way I laugh
the way I fly

It was a Thursday when you passed. I was pretending to read Anne Sexton, waiting impatiently for you to drift away from us. But death is never drifting, is it? sweet peaceful drifting? It is heaving, gravelly heaving and bile and bowels, with eyes pealed back in terror and no words. How would I have known? I learned. I gazed into your eyes, matching your terror, those eyes fixed upward and to the left, for days, fixed on Jesus, that vigilant hologram ever in the corner, waiting, come to take you home. And suddenly, those eyes were empty. Why couldn't you look at me, Mother? in our last moments together? Was I not comfort enough for you? And why your cold lips stitched shut? Nothing left to say? a thousand words, a billion. stitched shut.

stitched. forced into a smile. Even in death, you had to be pleasant, couldn't let your troubles show. If you could have spoken, at your funeral, you would have politely and graciously thanked your guests for coming, assured them that you were feeling much better, thank you very much, and then, only once the parlor was cleared of witnesses, collapsed back into your coffin. But you couldn't hide it anymore; things are not alright.

Yes, today has been a crying day.