Surrounding myself daily with pieces of my old life, the life my mother was part of, feels damaging. Even if she was just in the background of the object, the most tangential connection makes my heart ache. Each reminder feels like a scratch --- some, a clawmark --- against my skin.
I'll see a book and I'll remember reading it for high school, likely seated at the kitchen counter until my mom would begin cleaning and stacked up my mess of pencils, looseleaf pages, and textbooks while scolding me for my explosive workspace. I'll use deodorant and remember it's the only brand my mother ever bought, but she let me pick out the scent of blue fig and orange blossom when I began to whine for more freedom in high school. I'll see a dress and I'll remember I wore it to the college graduation party my parents held at their house, the last time we celebrated together, though I mostly hung out with my sister and boyfriend the entire time. I'll browse the plastic boxes of berries at the grocery store, and I'll remember how my mother would buy raspberries year round and eat anything with raspberries as an ingredient but especially always lined up at the drive through for Culver's raspberry custard.
And some things were hers. I wear them, though they sting when they touch my skin. It's as if they're taunting me, telling me they touched her last. Her wedding ring, barely ever around her finger but now hung on a chain around my neck. I wear it every now and then for good luck, though maybe that's ironic. An object from someone dead too young. How would that hold any luck?
Maybe it's just to have her near me. A wedding ring is the easiest identification of someone as a wife, and by extension when worn by a young woman, someone as a mother.
Maybe it's a silent, pleading way to tell the world I lost her. The woman who was a wife, my mother.
Her black and white Nikes, left as a spare pair in her trunk, wrapped around her feet last. They wrap around mine and maybe should feel comforting but I know that nothing of her is left in them. Nothing of her is left anywhere.
Her Sonicare toothbrush is now mine, and I just recently replaced the head. Before that, the bristles were the last to touch her teeth and when they touched mine, maybe some of that sacredness wore off. Maybe I'm trying to rid everything of her scent, of her skin, of her.
If she's not here now I wish she had never been.
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