Vivian

Sun, 10/28/2018 - 15:42 -- agrosen

i paint on my features to cover up the the guilt of my baldness when it wasn’t an option for my mom to hide hers

a privileged sickness vs an inevitable disease

 

our last meal before her surgery was peach cobbler

which sucks because now we never have peach cobbler

and i love peach cobbler

don’t worry we continue to have many meals together to this day

it just took a lot of days

 

like the day i was angry at my mom for picking me up late from school

because it had happened

she finally lost herself clump by clump in a shower that slowly striped away her youth

that took what the cold caps had failed to salvage what she had so desperately tried to control but nothing was under her control that day

and you see i couldn’t help her

i didn’t know how

because i couldn’t find my magnifying glass to prove to her everything was going to be okay

I couldn’t find my microscope to prove to my mother that she was still a woman

even without her long beautiful hair

so i started to cry

I cried and told her i left the microscope in a nursing home in georgia and i was so sorry

i had to use it it to find her own mother’s shrunken body in that filthy mattress

but she still seemed so angry

even though i’m always misplacing my things

 

for me the word mother has always meant the same thing as beautiful

or at least, a version of it

for my mother the word beautiful meant “i shouldn’t eat this”

and the word mother meant foreclosure

and i wish there weren’t such strict definitions to these abstract conditions

because they are stealing our sight

and taking our ability to love and be loved shamelessly

like a thief who is never caught

because we never realized what was stolen from us

too caught up everything that doesn’t really exist

 

too caught up in searching for microscopic proof

wasting time better spent in acceptance of what you will never be able to see clearly

you see, i have learned to accept the smudged and foggy glass

the glass that is your heritage

no matter how much grime lay embedded in the foundation

let it never shatter

because you will spend the rest of your life picking up the pieces

you’ll waste all the time you have left, searching through a magnifying glass for any fragmented figments

to make sure no one is there but you to bleed on the unstable edges of your great grandmother’s story

a story painted to you only by your father and a eulogy speech

is it okay to call a eulogy the most beautiful thing you have ever heard aloud?

and your father will never know he is made of magical words

so do not let that glass of magical words shatter or you will spend the rest of your life in regret of the mangly mess you made

 

but sometimes i realize these things too late

because she told me to remember her in the cherry tree

and in the snowflakes

you were born in the spring

and I didn’t say anything

i just sulked in the back seat

and ignored her call for the second time that week

and all i could think when I saw her in that mattress was pathetic pathetic pathetic

not realizing i was the pathetic one

 

not realizing there was so much more to life than living

 

because life is a 9  lettered battle called happiness

a 7 lettered victory called dancing

and a 5 lettered defeat called shame

Life is a double mastectomy

it is two lips interlocked

life is a eulogy is the most words i’ve ever heard your father speak

life is an eternal definition

life is “i’m never going to be able to eat peach cobbler again”

i realized that about the same time i knew i did not need a magnifying glass to prove to my mom that her bald body is flawless

  

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