I’m still looking for ways to find you, honor you, and bring you back to life.
When I see your picture or your handwriting in cards that were once freshly peeled from their crisp envelopes, you are near me again, and I can almost feel you in the room. You're going to enter any moment but tears arrive instead. And helplessness rings the bell like a restless delivery man.
I can’t hold your hand or inhale your perfume, that familiar swirl of vanilla and laurel spices will never splash my cheeks again, and though I try, I can't fully hear your spontaneous giggles, but I remember you stalling for more time like an embarrassed child with her hand in the cookie jar, thanks to a stray gray hair on your elegant chin.
As silly as those memories seem, when I plucked at those unwanted whiskers like you were my very own little hen, they are the same images that slice and cut me now, and I am the airborne flip and flap of a carp gasping for air, desperate for the flow of water to revive me. Then I'm the embarrassed child, longing for her mama, going room to room, searching for you inside a big house with old, worn-out clichés.
After four years, you’d think I might’ve learned to accept it and embrace how long we had one another. You were after all almost 90, an incredibly long life and legacy of children and grandchildren, and even great-grandchildren, holding your place in this unyielding world. And yet, it felt too soon--will always feel too soon. I wanted our time to go on without interruption, without age, without illness or frailty or pain. I wanted the comfort of your voice just in the next room or in the phone call across the miles, but still I wonder why you haven’t found me like you did before.
Will Clair de Lune ever play again in a garden shop that I wandered into looking for white cyclamen? Will I see a Monte Cristo on the menu and watch as you walk back to our table, shaking your head because I’m inhaling it with powdered-sugar fingers instead of a clean fork and knife? Will I hear Shakespeare’s voice inside the velvet treasure trove as I stand holding its soft red binding in that grim hallway with cheap green carpet that made my eyes and stomach ache? You inscribed it to Dad in 1982 but I found it on a throw-away shelf inside a building that was never your home. And Voltaire’s optimistic girl, not boy, whose arms reached for me and tucked a thin blue book inside my jittery hand in the East Village while strangers passed and looked on? It was you who turned my head that day in time to see the irony and reflection written in gold near the dusty glass case.
But I haven’t heard from you in so long, though I believed you’d keep trying to reach me somehow ~ now it’s as if you’ve forgotten me. Then I shake my head, knowing you could never do that. You wouldn’t know how. That’s Death’s dirty work, not yours. You would never abandon me.
So I will call you back, try you again and again, until I can hold your hand in mine, admire your glittering umber, put my cheek to yours and construct myself again in the folds of your unmistakable skin that grew me from seed. And I will make myself into the bark of your Ceylon tree. I’ll become your attar, an essential oil, the salve that heals a grown woman's heart. And I will flow and swim and drink from the aqueduct of you.
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