Remnant #4: Cassiopeia

"Cassiopeia, the Queen, can be seen in the northern hemisphere all year long. Cassiopeia was the wife of Cepheus and mother of Andromeda. She is represented chained to her throne in the heavens as punishment for her boast of being more beautiful than all the Nereids. As the skies rotate, she can sometimes be seen suffering as she hangs upside down."
 

Secrets under skin. Secret miracles hung around my neck. Secret sentences lodged in the base of my throat, unspoken. Lately, I have been sitting with the secrets and the silences. It has become my practice. Life keeps erupting all around me. Solar flares blaze and encircle my brain. A halo. And I don't have my words the way I used to, though I've inked them into my body. What is a writer when she isn't writing? The identity slips and so does the mask. Joan Didion said, "I don't know what I think until I write it down." Neither do I, but my words hold their reverent hush.

And so I pick up the needle and the thread again--back to the stitchcraft my mother showed me when I was a little girl. Needles singing through paper like my words can't. Needles telling women's stories--what they reveal and what they do not. My witches and saints, haunting at night.

I think what I mean to tell you is that one form is as good as another.  When one part of life doesn't work, let it sit there--stubborn and beautiful and unyielding--and pick up what does.  What I mean to tell you is that I will trade my words for your strands of patterned lace. I will kiss you back, if you kiss me first. Just don't ask me to tell you a story today. I don't know you. I love you already.  It is cold here, where I live. My heart, dissected in dim light, would glow with a million secret constellations.

Curiosity #6: Sally Mann

“I struggle with enormous discrepancies: between the reality of motherhood and the image of it, between my love for my home and the need to travel, between the varied and seductive paths of the heart."

~Sally Mann~

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.     

Curiosity #5: Joey L Photography

Halloween in Brooklyn

Relic #4: Betty Ann

This is something else you are missing: Betty Ann, 11 months, October 17, 1944.  I'd like it to mean something happy, her first steps.  But all I could think when it first started was, "Great, another person I love walking away from me."  Mother tells me I need to stop having these thoughts.  She says I need to tell Betty Ann that you are in the war, deployed to France or Germany, fighting the good fight for all of us.  That you never return will be just another sad piece of wartime fiction, like the cheap brass wedding band on the third finger of my left hand my father bought for me.  It turns my skin a dull, bruised green, but I'm not allowed to take it off.  It's another one of the bargains I've made with my folks to keep them supporting me in all of this.  Lies are compliance, are the secrets we'll all take to the grave.   

Betty Ann has your eyes.  That's another thought I'm not allowed, but it's the truth.  Your eyes were so blue it was like they swallowed the whole sky, some suffusion of light and molecules scattering through the space between us.  When she looks at me, I see you.  A final parting curse you left.  A sign that proves your existence, though nothing else can.  I tried to tell you all of this that day.  I tried to say, "You have a daughter."   But, your wife wouldn't let me get the words out.  

Still.  Betty Ann is here, striking out into the world on her own two feet.  Betty Ann is yours.  Ours. 

Silence is not erasure.