Letters: Purple

I can still feel that debilitating ache of remembering; how you and I — in the span of a month — learned the ins and outs of one another amid cold, late-night campus walks, closing shifts, soft-spoken chats in your living room. I remember that one cool April night, freezing with you on a bench in the quad but feeling nothing but more alive than I’d felt in months. My breath curling before me,

“You know those moments you look back on after years, that impact you in a way you’ll never forget? I can tell this is one of those moments.”

And if I’d known how scarce moments like that would be, I’d have breathed that night in a little deeper; smelled the cool, crisp air of early spring. I’d have memorized the constellations we pointed out in the park, remembered the way they twinkled and danced, reflected in your eyes.

God, I miss the luxury of raw, effortless connection. Of not having to try, of knowing my expression and explanation were always understood on a subatomic level. The familiarity I felt when you laughed. The way your words would stick to me like the residue of raindrops on my skin after drying. The way my heart felt oddly at ease and nervous at the same time. And it was all my fault — the way I ripped myself away from you, like a Band-Aid from a still-raw wound. I’d never opened up so fast or so easily before or since.

Sometimes, I wonder if you still think of me and how I might be doing, like how I wonder if you’re well now. If you’ve fallen in love. If my cold dismissal of our relationship stings you like it did me, or if I didn’t mean nearly enough to affect you like I hoped I had. I think of the way you’d say, “tell me something,” at any break in conversation. You had given me unwavering attention then, made me feel heard for the first time in my life. And when I took my glasses off, your breath caught; you remarked my beauty.

I wonder where you are now. I wonder if I ever cross your mind. Do you ever think of that night on that bench? I promise, I haven’t forgotten.

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This letter is adapted from a few poems that I wrote in 2018, the subjects of which all related.

A Fonder Memory

In the spring time, I can remember my mother as she used to be. Bold, hearty, loving, curious. I can remember the way she would stare at me with wonder and familiarity; how she saw herself and so much more pouring out from my words, glinting in my eyes, reflected in the ways I loved and treated people. I recall the times we would spring clean around the house, the windows opened to allow in the sweet, cool breeze and birdsong. The music playing distantly from the family room. Her hum, or the deep, round way she would sing the words to songs. I could feel a comfort in my belly those days. I could feel the connection to my mom, and her connection to me. Perhaps an invisible umbilical cord, tying me to her, always. Sometimes we would ride in the car for quick grocery trips or the occasional fast-food lunch. I can still hear the sound of her popping minty gum in her mouth between sentence. I remember the scent of the hand sanitizer that she kept in her car, a Malibu blue Ford Focus. When I was a kid, I loved that car and thought I would want one like it when I could drive.

I watched my mom a lot and — against my better judgment (I had no better judgment, I wasn’t even adolescent) — picked up many traits from her. I was acutely aware of and tuned-in to her experience as a young woman with two children and a husband. A young woman with a house and (usually) no job. A homemaker, a cook, an artist, a scrapbooker, a party planner, an ambitious dreamer. She was a cosmetologist until I was about five; after a point, her carpel tunnel made it impossible to continue her career. She worked here and there, enjoying the times she worked at scrap book stores, chasing her love for crafting and preserving precious memories among colorful cardstock pages. I remember she wanted to go to school for criminal justice, hoping that she may one day find closure for the murder of her cousin and best friend. I recall the feeling associated with experiencing her and my father interacting, but rarely a specific incident. My recollection — in all fairness, quite foggy now — was of a somewhat tumultuous relationship that nowadays I’m often surprised survived. I remember being in my room, sometimes hearing them argue, and wishing that they could avoid arguing so loud I could hear it. I remember things being my mother’s fault a lot. I remember witnessing her feeling guilty. I think she thought she hid it well, but I was always a deeply sensitive and intuitive child. Later, when I reached my teen years, I would go so far as to suggest her separation from my father; I remember her, very gently and quietly, considering returning to her home state to be with her family again.

Once I was older, I tried distancing myself from my parents as a way to reject the emotions I could feel through them and because of them. I made a conscious decision to feel things in spite of them. However, I had already deeply internalized those emotions and fell into traps that would perpetuate my experience of them and the discomfort associated with them. I would feel the defeat, disinterest, guilt, shame, desperation. I feel like I inherited something from my mother that I don’t even know for certain exists. I just feel it. I could ask, but I constructed so many walls in hopes to avoid a relationship that would mimic my parents that I’m not sure how to just be human in their presence. Growing up, I could feel my mother’s sadness. I couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. I can infer now, but I can’t be sure otherwise. And I imagine she doesn’t remember things the same way that I do.

My mother and me, circa 2012 (or, my blonde era).

She’s nearly unrecognizable to me now. She’s been sick for so long that the library of medication she has taken through the years has changed her so drastically that she feels like a stranger. I get glimpses here and there of the woman who raised me, and I still love her. I love this new woman too, but it feels different. As I grew, I helped her more than she helped me. It feels wrong to say that, but my formative years were largely spent helping my mother survive. Witnessing panic attacks that resulted in ambulances and hospital visits; experiencing vestibular migraine flair-ups that caused her to be bedridden for days or weeks at a time. She’s lost a lot of her memory. She’s lost a lot of her personality. She doesn’t speak the same way she used to. Often, she’ll slur her sentences, unable to recall even basic words; forgetting that only 5 minutes ago she asked me how my day was at work. Her speech is slow and lethargic. Sometimes I think I can hear the gears grinding in her mind. Sometimes I wonder if she still remembers how to be a mother. When we talk these days, sometimes it just feels like telling any other older woman my experiences, my thoughts. It doesn’t often feel like she connects the stories to the person that she raised; it doesn’t feel like she recognizes that her actions and reactions still affect the person I become. And that’s okay. Most of the time.

I’m usually good at resenting her sickness instead of her. But sometimes I slip up; sometimes I look at the things she did wrong and I blame her for it. And it’s likely that some of those things were her fault; we are only human, parents especially so. She thanked God when I finally built up the courage on my own to admit to her that I’d been cutting myself. She brushed off the news that I was accepted to my dream school. She (and my father) allowed my abuser to live with us for a year. I don’t think she has ever meant to hurt me and so I try not to hold that against her. I know she blames herself a lot already; that’s where I get it from.

I would like to hang onto the fonder memories. The warm days in my childhood where my mom would eat snow cones with me, play board games, help me with art projects. The days when I could feel her love, when I could feel her warmth as she sang along to Madonna or Sade, when I could feel that I was my mother’s daughter. I am trying to rewrite the narrative in my head: that my mother, like me, is allowed to grow and change, and that that growth and change is inevitable. If she can embrace the differences in me as I get older, I should embrace hers too. I’m trying. The bones are still there. I can still love them.