Fire

Today is my mothers birthday. I think she would’ve been 52. It’s a sad revelation that I cant even remember her age because those tiny memories have been buried under the stacks of debris that rose to the surface when she died. When she died I was 18, in Mexico with my friends for Winter Break, drinking too many pina colodas and acting like my life was a party- and that she and all her endless problems had no effect on me anymore. The last time I spoke to her was a long distance phone call when she must have wrestled the receiver from my father’s hands the day before she died. She could’ve been high or she could’ve just been worried.  Aren’t all mothers worried when their teenage daughters run off to Mexico with their boyfriends in tow? She sounded sleepy and in love, the way she always did on the phone. So much is lost in the memories we forget and things we said and did that never come back to us. But I remember some of it. She told me to be safe. To have fun for her. I was so mad that she even had the audacity to try to make my vacation anything about her at all. I hung up the receiver with a tired sigh like I had a million times before. She died the next morning.

Am I old enough now to face the problem she was in life in order to make peace with the shade she is now that’s she’s gone? People hear your mother died when you were young and a look of pity and compassion mars their expression like you’re a little dog left in the rain. That made me angry for so long I didn’t know what to do when people asked about her. I fantasized about making up stories for a woman who was so much glamour personified…the woman she would’ve been had the cards not been stacked against her. The romance of trips to Paris and the clothes stacked like magazines in the huge closet. The frilly lace pieces of lingerie she kept in baskets all testimony to a dying star. An ember burning bright then extinguished by her own selfishness disguised as the need to be loved. What do we do with the tangle of pain and hope and love left behind? What does anyone do when you hope in the idea of an afterlife if only to say I wish things could’ve been different. Is it even worth saying after so much time? I hope in the idea of hope, like I have so many times before.

I like to think I’ve come to an understanding of my mother at the very least. That her ghost has hung like a veil over my shoulder since I was young…even while she was alive. She was drowning in her own self pity for so long her fantasies were in fact her reality. When the drugs and alcohol exacerbated the deterioration she was simply sick. Migraines and head colds and insomnia packed up behind towers of prescription bottles like orange beacons on the bedside table. Beacons to light her way home. I want to feel like I am mature enough to see through the lies and pain in order to see the person she saw. Someone sick and in love with love but never having received enough, no matter who loved her in the end. Beautiful but scarred. Mature but naïve. Selflessly kind yet overwhelmingly selfish. A perfect paradox; my mother.

And yet here when I think I’ve come so far I remember her more fondly than anything else, despite the gaping wounds she inflicting with the touch of a finger. The slice of a word she’d hurl into the air like confetti until it crashed down around us like glass exploding. She was still my mother. She was indeed one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever known. She was whimsical and adventurous. She was so giving it crippled people to see kindness on the face of a Goddess. She was set in motion by her own ability to make people believe the things she wanted them to and fueled by the honest to god truth that people would always go out of their way for her. She convinced men to give her presents and women to give her friendship. She was a fire. Both arrestingly beautiful and simultaneously destructive. That is how I best remember her. Burning, burning, burning. But so bright, it was blinding white light.

Happy birthday Mom. I do miss you and in my own way, I love you very much.