Time Passes

There’s a section in Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse called “Time Passes.” It’s somewhat jarring compared to what comes before, because the people who filled up the novel’s pages are suddenly mere echoes; their deaths—a mother, a daughter, a son—are relegated to brief parenthetical commentary. Things, once beloved, lose their luster and light. Dust accumulates on surfaces. And, indeed, time passes. Emptied out of human form and filled to the brim with inanimate objects, these pages capture so profoundly the quiet vacancy of death. Take this passage, for instance:

What people had shed and left—a pair of shoes, a shooting cap, some faded skirts and coasts in wardrobes—those alone kept the human shape and in the emptiness indicated how once they were filled and animated; how once hands were busy with hooks and buttons; how once the looking-glass had held a face; had held a world hollowed out in which a figure turned, a hand flashed, the door opened, in came children rushing and tumbling; and went out again. Now, day after day, light turned, like a flower reflected in water, its sharp image on the wall opposite. Only the shadows of the trees, flourishing in the wind, made obeisance on the wall, and for a moment darkened the pool in which light reflected itself; or birds, flying, made a soft spot flutter slowly across the bedroom floor.

The absence of these individuals is magnified in relation to the spaces they filled, the clothes they wore, and the objects they used. In this second year of grief, as disbelief has been replaced by the new realities which have taken root, I keep finding myself face to face with the various things that have been emptied out, both literally and metaphorically, things once “filled and animated” by my mother’s presence: a salt container, a sweater, my kitchen. I feel her absence most, however, with my son. While he talks about my mother now more than ever before—he’s always questioning, narrating and elaborating on “Halmi”—I suspect that he does so increasingly as he remembers less and less. She is an absence around which he walks.  He understands that she is, somehow, important, but to him she’s little more than myriad things that she has shed and left behind: this picture, this table, this uncle, this aunt, this mommy. And though, perhaps, his coming-to-be was initially a difficult thing for her to grasp (because it fell so far outside her comfort zone and understanding), watching the two of them love one another became one of my greatest joys and deepest sources of healing. Appropriately, I suppose, watching him reach for memories that are little more than "Halmi" shaped objects has been a source of profound sorrow.

As we find in To the Lighthouse, however, the dead don’t disappear easily. Yes, different rhythms spring up, the house is aired out and new characters move into the foreground while others recede. But those who are absent continue to haunt the pages of the novel; they fill in the gaps; they lie at the center of various visions, motivations and excursions that the remaining characters experience and undertake. And so it is that even in death my mother continues to compel and constrain me. The work of disentangling ourselves from the ties that bind us to one another apparently doesn’t end with death as I naively thought it might. Those cords are still drawn taut across time and within me. And though I am in some ways a little freer to undertake the knotty work of undoing those ties, the loosening and unbinding is still a painful and laborious endeavor. Because, after all, we can’t be chained to the dead forever (Unless, of course, you’re Michonne. Sorry, folks, a little nod to The Walking Dead). Even as we’re loving them, missing them and grieving them, we also move beyond them, like the characters in Woolf’s novel who finally make the trip to the lighthouse sans mother, brother and sister. 

Here, at the end of year two, I understand how people who figure so enormously in our lives slowly become parenthetical; we fill up the hollowed out space (              ) of our lives with these reminders of their human shape. They are too vast to be contained so, paradoxically, we shrink them down to make them manageable and deliverable: “This,” we attempt to say, “is my mother. This is your grandmother. This was a  woman—flawed, difficult, beloved and alive.” As life tumbles by relentlessly, they become the narrative asides, the how-to-explain-this-thing-about-me-or-you, the anecdotal evidence of the ways that we were lashed together and how, inevitably, we find ourselves lapping at the shores of life again—present and past, ebb and flow, together and alone, moored and adrift, “rising and falling with the sea."

Burn me up, Scotty.

If you’re friends with me on Facebook, then you’ve heard about the migraine. Saturday was a beautiful day—sun, blue skies, mid-sixties. It was the kind of day that makes everyone feel alive again. I know, because I found all of Bloomington at the park where Bennett and I choose to spend a big portion of the afternoon. He played happily while I chatted with other parents from around town. But here’s the thing, I never know about sunglass etiquette. It was really bright out, but I always feel like it’s so rude to hide behind dark glasses when you’re talking one-on-one to someone, so I took them off. Bad choice.

It got too late to cook dinner and Bennett asked to go to the only fast food place he knows—Chipotle. I said yes. I felt fine until we got inside and suddenly it happened. I had one of those pre-migraine auras. Everything was shiny and slippery in my field of vision. The sunlight that had been such a welcome source of light and warmth all day became too much to bear. I don’t know how to explain it except to tell you that things felt reversed; the sunshine came, instead, from some source inside of my head and burst outward through my eyes. It was blinding. And that’s what I thought, initially, as I stared at the shadowy Chipotle employee who was asking me what I wanted: “I’m going blind. I wonder if my eyes are as fiery right now as they feel. I’m dying. I’m obviously dying. I’m going to die in this Chipotle, of all places, with my son at my side asking repeatedly if I can transform his toy back into a truck.” I couldn’t decide if it was tragedy or comedy in the making. Then the pulsing began. It was quiet at first, just a tiny “tap, tap, tap” in the top of my head, but it signaled what was coming. And I panicked. What if I didn’t make it home before the tapping became a hammering? What if I stopped being able to see enough to drive home? What would I do with my kid? What if my son didn’t cooperate? I knew I had somewhere between 20-40 minutes before I was completely incapacitated. We made it home. I took the ibuprofen/Benadryl cocktail that Kim gave me last time (I don’t know the science, but it works) and then I curled up into a ball on the couch and only moved to start the next episode of Bennett’s show. He was quiet and gentle, worn out from the park but also concerned because he’d never seen me like that before. “Don’t worry,” I mumbled, “I’ll be okay soon. I just need to close my eyes and be still for a little while.”

I closed my eyes but my brain remained hell-bent on birthing its extravagant and excessive pain-light. I shivered and shook, feeling unbearably cold (though it was probably a pain response) and waited for it to subside. And as I lay there, I recalled the last time the sunlight had brought so much pain. It was the summer of my mom’s illness. As the tumors resumed their growth post-radiation, she’d begun getting headaches with increasing regularity. They were mostly brief, but intense. You’ll remember how full our house was then, my brother and kids driving in with regularity for weeks at a time, my own child, my sister (who has never known a quiet day in her life), my father, my partner and myself. It was unavoidably noisy. My mother had never been one to complain about physical discomfort, not really, and the effort of talking made her even more reticent about her pain. So I would watch her for the telltale signs that she was having a headache or that she was experiencing discomfort and I would go around the house shushing people, driving them outside or upstairs, snapping in hushed whispers at the kids or at my siblings. It was awful. I was probably awful. I felt how horrible and unfair the whole thing was but I couldn’t help myself; her pain was my pain. I lost weight without trying. I was more sensitive to noise, to smells, to the way the world expanded or contracted according to the time of day. I wanted more than anything to make her last few months as peaceful and as comfortable as possible, but the world and those tumors kept interfering.

But with the headaches came another particularly nasty side effect of the tumors—her body’s inability to regulate her temperature well. So when we moved from the heat of the day to the coolness of an air-conditioned building, she would become dizzy and collapse or she would get one of those awful headaches and then be sick. It was hard to predict when and where this would happen. Sometimes she was fine and other times she wasn’t. On one of the last days she was with us, she had a bad episode. We decided to go out for lunch. My sister and I helped my mom out of the car while my dad parked the car. With one of us on each side of her, we began the slow trek to the door, and I felt her legs buckle. We were too far from any bench and I knew we’d end up dragging her if we tried to go any further. So we just sat her down in the middle of the sidewalk. Her limbs sort of convulsed, but the doctors had assured us that these were muscle spasms of sorts, not seizures, and we simply had to wait them out.

I felt the heat of embarrassment as I stood helplessly by. Not for me, but for her. People stared as they walked by; one man stopped to ask if he could help. “No, but thank you,” I responded, as politely as possible. I wanted to shield her from the prying curiosity and pity I saw in people’s faces. There’s no dignity in those moments. Movies so often portray the heartbreaking but peaceful sides of death. They show us people setting off on one last grand adventure or individuals gasping out last words from the sterility of their beds. Rarely do they show the gruesome, the humiliating and the altogether too-awful-for-words parts of dying. Who wants to see that? There’s nothing sensational about the fetid underbelly of death. I sat there beside her pissed at everyone and everything. And suddenly I was enraged at the sun. The warmth was no longer welcome. It was, instead, heavy and oppressive. The sunlight sizzled, white and blinding, as it came at me from the pavement. The heat of embarrassment blossomed into blazing fear as I realized how utterly frail we were, how insubstantial. As a kid I worried about so many weird things and one of them came back to me as I sat there beside my mother.  Poised on the verge of incineration, I contemplated what it would be like to spontaneously combust into flames.

As the memory of that day came back to me through the fog of my pain, I thought, “Maybe this is how it starts.” I imagined myself as a pile of ashes on the couch, opposite my son, just like I’d seen in those books so many years ago when I’d been obsessed with images of people who’d spontaneously combusted—a mound of black char in an otherwise untouched environment. It made me almost hysterical with laughter or sadness or incredulity to imagine someone coming in to find my son still sitting, oblivious, at his end of the couch watching television. There’s an episode of the Twilight Zone for you.

When I woke up on Sunday morning, I had a migraine hangover. I felt like I’d been dragged back from the brink of myself. I felt my heartbeat more acutely than I usually do. It felt steady and sure, but that spot in my head pulsed gently, a quiet reminder of my mortality. That morning, I ventured out into the sun—fearfully, glasses on, taking no chances. But by late afternoon, the last vestiges of pain had dissipated. I watched Bennett run around the park again with his friends, so much life coursing through their tiny limbs and I remembered that the things that make us vulnerable are also the things that set us apart from those inanimate objects that will, likely, long outlast us but will never know the fly-by-seat-of-your-pants-coming-down-the-slide-too-fast rush. There’s nothing new under the sun here, folks. That we feel joy or pain, that we can be blindsided by illness or surprised by the delightfulness of our bodies, that that we sometimes heal and other times find ourselves wounded in ways we can’t always mend—well that’s life, right? Eventually, we’re all just grit and dirt again. We might as well get close to the sun in the meantime. It warms. It’s life giving. And according to fringe statistics and a handful of YA apocalyptic novels, we’ll probably combust in its orbit one day. I’m not chasing death, but maybe I’m just saying that for today, I won’t bemoan (as much) the cost of living. For now, feeling just means I’m not yet a pile of ash. That’s okay with me. 

“I grow old.. I grow old..."

I watched my son as he zoomed around the fellowship hall. He was flying high. Well, as high as a three-year old can get when he’s riding a tsunami-sized blood sugar spike from liberally doled out cookies and full-strength juice. I cringed. I was less concerned with the peace he might be disturbing and more worried about safety. You see, at our church we’ve got a lot of older folks, and I mean people who are well into their eighties and nineties. The intergenerational aspect is one of the things I love most about the place we’ve found, but it also means coming face-to-face quite often with the many ways that our bodies succumb to those currents of time. I tried, in the moment, to redirect my son and ask him to calm his body, but he’s the kind of kid who really needs quiet and stillness to process. He also needs to understand the reason behind the request. So I waited. And when I laid him down for a short nap that afternoon, I revisited the issue:

“Hey buddy, do you remember when you were running around and having so much fun at church?”

“Yeah, I do!” He giggled.

            “I love watching you have fun. But do you also remember that I asked you to slow down a little bit and make sure your body wasn’t bumping into other people?”

“Uh…yeah!”
“Well the reason I asked you to do that is because we have a lot of people whose

bodies have gotten older and might not be as strong as they were. If you bumped into them zooming around so fast, they might fall down and break something…like an arm or a hip. Can you understand that?”

            “Yeah, I do.”

He was quiet for a few seconds as he continued to process this information, and then he asked, “mommy, are you very old?” He cupped my cheek with a tiny hand, caressing my face in that way that I’ve caressed his so many times.

“Well,” I laughed, “not yet, honey.”

“Yeah, not yet,” he said in his half-serious, half-amused way, “but one day you might be.”

One day, I might be old. It’s a notion that I hadn’t really considered. I’ve never really been a visionary. Sure, I make plans and work toward goals, but I don’t ever look toward the future in a “one day when” kind of way (hello, despair with a smile, here). Lying there beside him, at the end of another exhausting holiday season, I was suddenly enthralled with the idea that I might get old one day. I suppose it was especially revelatory because around this time of year I feel a deep-down-in-my-bones weariness that tricks me into thinking that I’m older than I am. This year, that was compounded by the weighty realization that my mother is no longer with us. I know, I know, this whole blog is more or less about that fact, but last year we were still reeling, still in a state of disbelief; I think I’ve reached a place of acceptance. I feel the fullness of her absence stretching itself out in me from limb-to-limb and settling down quietly in that place of real knowing. That is to say, that there are few things I know more fully right now than my mother’s absolute and irrevocable absence.

That certainty found me as I began the process of playing Santa for my son. At 11 pm on Christmas Eve, after six hours in the car, for a five-hour visit, with family one state away, I packed all of his trains and tracks into a bin so that I could erect a construction site in their place. And as I stared at the table emptied of all it's clutter, I was struck by the way that we typically move, almost imperceptibly, from one phase of life to another. We never really clear out the clutter completely, we sort of just shuffle through it. New things make their way onto the table while, hopefully, old things find their way off of it and before we know it, we’ve transitioned into something different. So there was something jarring about the table’s absolute barrenness.

The past and present coalesced momentarily on the surface of that table through that telescopic lens of my mother’s absence. She bought the table for my son’s first birthday “because,” she said, “it was something that would grow with him for awhile.” And it has. It served, first, as a supportive object: he pulled up and walked around it, beaming at his newfound dexterity and independence. Then it became a catchall for whatever toys happened to be in favor at the moment. Eventually, we laid tracks and rolled trains. We’ve spent incalculable hours around that table over the past two years, and in that time he has grown inches, acquired language, discovered those first inklings of interest and passion, skyped grandparents, and daydreamed about whatever it is that toddlers daydream about. We’ve bumped our shins and stubbed our toes on it. We’ve found joy and frustration in equal parts at that table. In hindsight, it was both utterly remarkable and categorically mundane in its everydayness; we barely noticed the way that we moved from phase to phase.

That table has been, in all the myriad ways we might use this phrase, a transitional object. It was the first and last tangible gift that my mother gave to us, and it signified so much more than a space for play. Bennett and I have both found ourselves in the four corners of that table—him as an individual with interests apart from me and myself as a mother and a woman apart from my mother's understandings of those things.  I realized, as I placed the tiny orange cones around the table’s perimeter and poured the rice into the plastic bin, that this newest phase, the things that I was in the process of laying down and the things I might later remove were things that she would never know. And when the moment righted itself and time resumed, I felt the shift inside me in the way that you might feel a bone popping back into place—my mother was thrust into the past and I was firmly relocated in the present, in that space of endless transition that we claim for the living.

It’s always around this season of Epiphany that we begin to throw those tired phrases around. You know the ones I mean—“carpe diem!” or “Live each day like it’s your last!” We make promises to ourselves and to others about the things that we’ll change or that we’ll endeavor to do. But this year, I’m not doing any of that. I won’t feel harried or hurried to fit it all in, to cross things off the bucket list, to know where I’m headed or what I want, to be fully actualized (whatever the heck that means), to unburden myself of all the things that weigh me down, etc. Nope, I won’t live with the scarcity of time biting at my heels. I’m going to live as if, one day, I might be old. I’m going to live slow and sure and steady, for the long haul rather than the sprint. My mother didn’t have time to grow old; she died at 58. But even then, as she was dying, it wasn’t the things she hadn’t done that she regretted. If anything, it was having done too much. She sat in my living room for weeks just looking out the window and she said, as I hovered anxiously, “I don’t think I’ve ever had time to just sit here like this.” If I live to be 65 (which, for the record, isn’t very old at all), I will have grown older than my mother, and I will have lived longer without her than with her. Certainly I hope to have done some things along the way, but I also hope that I will have taken the time to clear off the table completely, to bask in the stillness and emptiness that can be found between things. So long as there are transitions to be had, there is new space to be remade into almost anything we can imagine. 

The Thing About Love Stories

A year ago today, my phone rang. I knew what the news would be before I answered and in those few seconds before I pressed the button, I thought: “No. Not yet. I’m not ready. I’m on my way. Please, not yet.” In those almost-five months after my mother’s diagnosis, we’d waited every day for this very thing to happen, but when my dad said the words, “your mother just passed away,” I still wasn’t ready. My bags were already packed, and I was already on my way out the door to school that Saturday morning to ensure that I had planned and prepped everything that the substitute would need. When I hung up the phone, I swallowed a sob and calmly called my brother and sister. I kissed my son and drove to the quiet, dark halls of Bloomington High School North where I finished writing up lesson plans, making copies of things and sending out emails. I did it all calmly. Quietly. Numbly.

What I wanted to do was kick a hole in the wall. I wanted to scream. I wanted to lie down somewhere and not get up for a week, maybe two. I was heartbroken that I hadn’t made it to her in time. I was mad at my dad for waiting so long to call. I was angry with myself for not having gone when I got that little twinge of whatever-we-call-it that told me the time was near. I was pissed at my mom for getting cancer in the first place and for not recognizing the signs sooner. I was irate at the miracle cancer drug that had put so many stage four cancer patients in remission or bought them more time, but hadn’t been a match for my mom. I was furious at the universe and at God and at whatever else because I wasn’t ready. My mom and I, we’d just begun in so many ways. My son had only spent a short two years with her. We weren’t done. It wasn’t time. But she was gone.

But here’s the thing about love stories, the end is never really the end. So many great love stories end in death, and we’ve been taught to mourn love’s end. It’s tragic. It’s hopeless. It’s final. I suppose the thing that Christianity gets right is that love doesn’t have a “best if used by” date; it doesn’t expire. Let’s not quibble about theology; whether we take Christ’s resurrection literally or metaphorically (or not at all) isn’t the point here. The point is that love is transferred and transmuted over and again until it becomes impossible to find all the places where it begins and ends. However imperfect we are in our loving, love somehow still persists.

Most days I’m still not ready. My mom and I, we aren’t done. For now, I’m still caught up in the loop of loving which she drew me into and into which I’ve drawn my son. But I’m also caught up in those circles of love that we, you and I, have drawn together—the ones you’ve offered up to me and the ones I’ve extended in return. Holy Venn diagrams, people, that’s a lot of love. This is my love story, and it isn’t finished yet.

 

Things that Go Bump in the Night

 Can I tell you a secret? I’m afraid of the dark. Growing up, I sometimes felt like we lived at the crossroads of Real-life and Crazy-Town, where most roads actually led to Crazy-Town.* Supernatural beings cluttered our house, and I was aware, from a very young age, of the reach of their collective gazes. I internalized them like some Foucauldian Panopticism. They settled like dust on the furniture, splayed themselves across corners like cobwebs and hovered faintly in the air the way last night’s dinner always hangs half-fragrant, half-rancid on the drapes. At night I shrank from those beings—good or malevolent—as I stared into the shadows that danced around my room taunting me.

*If there were a graphic, it would look something like this:

We moved every three or four years because my dad was in the military, and each time, I hoped that they’d be left behind. My mom was, after all, a masterful packer and purger; she had to be with all of the moving. Somehow, though, those “spirits” seemed to follow us from house to house. If we argued on Sunday morning while our family prepared to go to church, it was always the “devil” intervening and staunching our joy in the process. On the other hand, whenever something good happened in our lives, whenever convenience and chance collided to produce some unforeseen outcome, it was always through the hand of God or the Holy Spirit. Wherever I turned, the supernatural world orchestrated our daily lives and decided our eternal fates.

It’s no surprise, then, that when we argued or when I took a position my mother found problematic, she leapt to demon possession. She didn’t mean to be cruel. She actually believed in the possibility. “Did you see that in her eyes?” she’d ask my dad in a heated moment between us. And in the midst of an argument I’d think, frantically, “What? What did she see?” Terrified, I’d scan my outsides and take stock of my insides, trying to ascertain what it was, exactly, that she had seen.

Later that night she would lay prostrate across my body, deadweight, her hot tears scalding salty tracks along my arm. When she left, I’d trace the length of them and count them in the lines—those lines of self-loathing and fear—that I’d carved into myself. In those moments with her, I held myself perfectly still and tried to take slow oceanic breaths, even though I was terrified, hoping she would think I was asleep. She prayed over me in Korean, demanding that the unclean spirits leave my body, seeking mercy for my soul and pleading peace for both of us. Perhaps if she’d prayed in English I would have rolled my eyes or laughed or told her to go away. But there was something about the urgency and ferocity of her prayers in Korean, that hard syllabic certainty, that cowed me into silence. Instead, I waited, wondering if that night would be the night that something horrible would exit my body, Exorcist style. Eventually, she’d drag her exhausted and fear-laden body off of mine. Sometimes she’d go off to her own bed, the click of her bedroom door serving as a Pavlovian signal of safety and sleep. Other times she’d return to those household chores that she’d put on pause as she attempted cast out my demons. Often, I’d lie there for hours afterwards, watchful and still, waiting for my body to betray me.  After all, what do you do when the monster you fear most isn’t lurking beneath the bed or skulking around in the closet?

I wrote, in another post, about the productive side of fear. But fear is also, of course, incredibly destructive. It’s a master dissembler. It gives us lies in truth-colored wrappers. It transforms otherwise innocuous shadows into our worst nightmares. It urges us to flee though nothing pursues us. It prompts us to attack when there’s no danger to be found.  Knowing now what I do about my mother and about her own difficult past, I’m able to understand a little better how I might have begun to take the shape of her fears. I became the specter of all her missteps, misfortunes and all her might-have-beens. When she looked at me, she saw all the lies that fear had fed her about herself writ large on my body, and she wanted to save me…from myself, but more importantly perhaps, from becoming her. In the process, however, we became monstrous together. 

In the months that followed my mom’s death and in the midst of all the grief and disorienting chaos, I found that I was terrified again. Even though I don’t really believe in the spirit world, the nighttime hauntings of my childhood stayed with me. I was afraid to be alone in my house, especially at night. I was afraid to sleep. I was afraid to dream.*  Drawing on cultural and religious confirmation, my mother treated dreams as sacred texts. They were signs that she lived by. For me, however, they were just dreams. Fodder for a creative life? Yes. The important symbolic working out of day-to-day glitches and deeper traumas? Sure. But signs and divine/prescient messages? No. So when one of my parents’ congregants told me that she’d dreamed of my mother—they’d met in a stairwell and my mother had assured this woman that she was okay and we shouldn’t worry about her—I was surprised to find that I was pissed. What business did this woman have dreaming about my mother? Then, I was hurt. Why had she visited this woman and not me? I felt instantly foolish because I didn’t even believe in those things, right? There was, I suppose, a small part of me that was still waiting for my mother to be right, for the spirit world to be blown wide open the minute I closed my eyes. If that were true, what other things would I have to accept? And then I just felt relieved that it hadn’t been me who’d had the dream.

*Among the many things my mother passed down to me, one of the most powerful is a rich and vibrant dream life.  I remember my dreams on a weekly and almost daily basis. I’ve learned to slip back into them after waking in order to finish a narrative arc. I’ve discovered that I can change the landscape and rewrite outcomes. I’ve taught myself to fly in moments of danger. I can call up familiar dream worlds again and again.

I’m not sure how I survived the next five or six months. I stopped dreaming altogether. Probably because I stopped reaching REM sleep. I hovered, instead, somewhere in those four stages of NREM sleep, exhausted but safe. But as the one-year anniversary of my mother’s death draws near, I’ve begun to dream of her often and without fear. In my dreams, we are both exposed and remade a hundred times over, not into romanticized selves that we weren’t and would never be, but into selves that we’d forgotten and had begun to be to one another when she died.  

The other night as my son and I looked for the moon before bed (his newest bedtime ritual), the cord from the blinds rustled in the breeze and cast a momentary shadow on the ceiling. Before I processed what it was, my heart began to race and I gasped involuntarily. “What is it, mommy?” my son asked, his voice tight with anxiety.  I made my voice light and easy, “it was only the wind, sweetheart, rustling the strings. It just surprised me; that’s all.” I’m determined that our demons not be his. In these iterations to him—where strings are just strings, chairs are just chairs and shadows are just the product of object and light—the night has begun to take on less terrifying shapes. And in those small pockets of peace, in those moments of relief from the fear has that threatened to terrorize and consume me, I suspect that, after all, I’ve found the thing my mother wanted most for me.

(August 11, 2014)

It’s not my dream. I feel the foreignness as I slide into it, liquid and warm. It’s her dream. Flecks of gold fall from the sky landing on my eyelashes, caressing my cheeks and covering the ground. It glitters. It’s too bright to look anywhere but at her and even she is too much to bear as she shimmers in the mid-day sun. She is me and not me. She is the first face I can recall and the last face I see each night.

 She comes to me across the field and offers me her gift, “this is all my love for you.”

 I take the small, slippery pearl and swallow it whole; it fills up all the wells of longing in me. “Spin me,” I say.

Hands clasped in hers, she sends me soaring—arms outstretched, feet flying behind me. She spins us out of time. I am five. I am ninety. I am fifteen. I am ageless. I am dead. I am born. I am alive. I am all the things I’ll ever be and all the things I never was. And for a moment, together, we are enough.