I wake most mornings with my heart in my hands.
(Soul of my soul. The man says to his dying daughter. Lifting the lids of her eyes. Holding her close to him one last time, and one last time, and one last time. And I know now. I don’t have to imagine. This tearing on the inside.)
The weather is still warm here though the mornings are cold. Needing a jacket and socks, the moon waking me full at 6 am on its way west to the ocean. I miss watching the sunset. (A thing about motherhood no one has mentioned - you will miss watching sunsets. You will miss your old body even if the new one looks clothed like the old one.)
We pick the lemons and pomelos off the trees. My husband digs up the stone fruit so we can make way for an airstream. The squirrels eat the roots of the passion fruit he planted for me. We try to figure out what to plant for the bees.
My daughter will still eat broccoli and salmon, but not much else. Peanut butter, avocado. I try to cook squash but it’s tasteless, the eggplant I put next to it hardly cooked through.
I think of giving up.
Summerland full of tar. We spray sunscreen on the bottoms of A’s feet and wipe them. Capturing her smile as she charges toward the sea, in her hands, fistfuls of sand. The way I hold fistfuls of her hair in my hands. Burying myself in her.
It is my mother in law’s birthday. They go to the market and bring back supplies to bake a cake. Almond flour, dried fruit.
As always, there is so much laundry, and everyone has been sick for days, and then a respite, and then again.
I talk about leaving social media - one of the characters in the story I can’t finish writing saying to another “You inevitably see something you didn’t want to see.” Old friends not telling you they are in town, The Grand Canyon, pregnancy, birth, a beautiful woman fishing, the first snowfall.
There is something about motherhood, or the mid 30s, or the war, or the heat, that makes death suddenly much closer than it appeared. Each day I see my daughter in some horrific situation, something involving a car, something involving strangulation, something involving choking. It’s just a flash, but it’s there all the time. This deep terror, this deep knowing, that this is all there is, this living and luck.
I don’t think I can stand to lose one more person. I say to the therapist. When she asks why I am there. Because by the time I was 25 I had lost 8 close friends. By the time I gave birth 10. And that doesn’t even cover the living ones. Which sometimes hurt the most. I tell her.
I have been at a loss, most days, for words. I find, I am in waiting again, that I am contemplating meditation, and Ayurveda, and AA meetings, and a page a day for T. which I was successful for one week only, that I am very far away from poetry and so much more interested in prose. That I sneak in a movie when I can, because it was once a part of my life. And I feel guilty for watching and not producing. But how pleasing it was to sit next to a girlfriend, both of us turning to each other in a darkened theater, in our chosen medium, our mouths open in surprise and love, of a story that just let you sit in it. Whispering. Is that her husband or her son? That it is so easy these days to forget, this specific pleasure, this excitement, running into another girlfriend I love, walking down the street afterwards to have Thai and split a chamomile tea in Hollywood. Where just a few blocks away I saw S. alive for the last time, wiry, and stoned, covered in paint, and baiting me to join him. Each pocket of this city filled with first kisses and last kisses, and almosts, and the corner where my life changed. It is hard to shake the past. Isn’t that God? My girlfriend says when I share the story with her of how I ended up getting sober. And it is. And I think about how another time S. had come to my apartment, hounding to be in the self-portraits I had been taking for years. And when he entered that dusty space he opened the windows and said you could put some flower boxes here. And for years, I thought of what I might have planted, blue and purple pansies, some marigolds.
oh my god, jane
jane, this is so beautiful.