Remnant #3: Viva Frida

She sits in a pool of light--early morning, windows wide, the kind of light that's perfumed with mowed grass and burning wood in equal measure.  The cusp-season.  The space between the slow final exhale of summer and autumn's chilly inhalation.  That moment that only lasts a moment.  The light, a curious mixture of fading fire and honey.  There is where she rests herself.  The in-between spaces she favors.

She isn't easy, so she lets the light be easy.  She glances at me when I turn over in bed, watching her.  Her eyes phosphoresce.  Wild, feral green.  Pupils thin as paper.  She glances at me, yawns, then reaches out--noticing me, noticing her.  She isn't easy, so she waits for me to prove my love is worth it.  She has held herself in check a very long time before offering her affection to me.  Frida-Kahlo, my cat, my wise teacher of boundaries.

Learning boundaries is a lesson I've been taught and retaught all my life.  The boundary of where I ended and my mother's body began.  What belonged to me and what belonged to others.  Stories I will share and ones I will not.  When my heart will spill open and when it should stay firmly shut.  Boundaries.  You may, you may not.  I take up this much space.  Don't cross the line.  You can have these pieces of me--you, I have tried to wipe all traces of off my skin.  Boundaries as brokenness.  Boundaries as saving grace.

When Frida came to me she was still a nursling--taken from her mother too soon for reasons beyond her control or mine.  I went inside the trailer where she was, took in the worn green carpets, the peeling paint, the TV blaring, the naked kids running around the house, the young woman who was giving kittens away, crying and saying how upset she was to have to split them up so soon, but she was facing eviction.  Crying because she was desperate.  Overwhelmed.  Sorry.

Frida was hiding inside a potted fern.  So small I could fit her into the palm of my hand.  Her mouth was ringed with mother's milk.  "You don't want that one--it's the runt.  Runts are always sick," the woman told me.  But, I did want that one.  The only one--though she hid from me.  Though she would never be easy.  She was the right one.  The teacher, the spitfire, the runt.  "...Frida Kahlo is a ribbon tied around a bomb."  ~Andre Breton~  She is also my companion, my guide, and my sidekick...one who couldn't have been more perfectly named, though I didn't know it at the time.  The one I chose.  The one who chose me.     

Remnant #2: She Would Be Given Back to Me

“All the time that I’d been thinking, I cannot continue to live, I’d also had the opposite thought, which was by far the more unbearable: that I would continue to live, and that every day for the rest of my life I would have to live without my mother. Sometimes I forgot this, like a trick of the brain, a primitive survival mechanism. Somewhere, floating on the surface of my subconscious, I believed — I still believe — that if I endured without her for one year, or five years, or ten years, or twenty, she would be given back to me; that her absence was a ruse, a darkly comic literary device, a terrible and surreal dream.”

~Cheryl Strayed~

Driving to work and the mist rising from the reeds along the edges of the water drifted like ghosts. I blinked away the beauty as it broke me open, broke my morning open. A quick flash of blurred motion beside me, and suddenly, the woman in the car next to mine was my mother, just for a second. Cognitive dissonance. Dead. Buried. Alive. Checking her reflection in the rearview mirror of a silver Mercedes. A low cry from the back of my throat. Realizing. Remembering.  

We buried her on a Saturday. Three years ago in December. I walked away from the open mouth of the grave, yawning open. Red clay earth. A sleek grey casket covered in cut roses. I wandered away from my family as they said goodbye. Alone. I refused to say goodbye to her. I haven't been back to the cemetery since. Three years ago in December. I am still waiting for her to come back. No one can tell me not to. 

There is no poetry in her death. There is no betterment in my grief. No logic or lesson in these words. Just a moment. Fleeting. Fragile. Mist.

Remnant #1: Daughters of Demeter

What happened when we gathered: candles, creation. tarot cards, revelations. water, wine. stories, evidence. Demeter, Persephone. empress, high priestess. my heart, your song.

What I heard when you dared to say it out loud: I know. I want. I see. I think. I feel. I try. I need. I hope. I can. I am, I am, I am.

What happened when you all left me and walked out into the rain: candles snuffed out. palo santo lit. room hazy with our energy. plumes of smoke from the incense, burning. washing wine glasses, I thought of how the fragile edges kissed your mouths, like the words. I thought, come back.