“If I had had another life as the person I was supposed to be, I’d go to France and sit at a red table and look out the window at blue and green waves…
…Someone who wasn’t in hiding would serve me cheese Danishes and coffee without arsenic”
-The Memory Palace, a memoir by Mira Bartok
Reading another girls’ journey with a mother like mine has me thinkinggrievingcrying. About how racked with guilt I feel that these past four months have been more about a relationship than my mother. Or Trinity, for that matter. How simply and easily I lose myself in order to find a distraction. How I can deal with the saddest, most devastating of scenarios: coming home to my dead father… But it all catches up to me when I least expect it.
We make our worlds so small sometimes. Letting only what is familiar in. Rejecting anything that causes fear. What demons stay hidden in the shadows while we grind through our day to day?
I think about the wide, loving circle that Trin is embraced with- only five years old.
Maybe every year you celebrate a birthday in observance that your circle is shrinking. That when death knocks on your door, you’d be lucky to have a handful of those who are kept close in your heart. Perhaps it is because with every year- every setback, disappointment or failure- it feels safer to close your heart and mind to the possibility of more.
Get cozy on your island.
Maybe schizophrenics are born on that island and view every person as an invader. And it’s heartbreaking to look at someone and wonder who they were supposed to be. And it’s frightening to think that my future may be just as deserted. Not because I’m sick, but because I’m afraid.
“I feel in my bones that my mother will always be sick. She might have a week or two of some semblance of normalcy. Maybe even a month. But she will forever be spinning in some dangerous orbit, knife in hand, and if I’m not careful I will forever be that small child frozen behind the wall.
I vow to hold on to beauty, no matter what- to sitting in a rich carpet of grass, a concert hall, a museum full or art- in a place that has nothing to do with the unbearable glare of grief…
…I am forever a dolphin in blue sleepless waves, swimming toward a distant fathomless light.”
-Mira Bartok
myob. words at your chest. freefall. 