I haven't been writing as much as I should be. It isn't from a lack of words or ideas, I just haven't wanted to share myself. I still don't want to share myself but sometimes your words don't care about what you want. Today the words win. I am defeated and better for it.
A House of Mirrors
To Those Who Created Me
...When I miss my nearest sister, I will go to a mirror and look away. If I’m lucky, out of the blurriness of peripheral vision I might catch a glimpse of a cheekbone, or the tip of her nose, maybe her chin. The more tears in my eyes, the more she comes into focus. Late at night, with glasses on the nightstand, I’ll walk to the bathroom still half in dreams and there too I might find her blurry figure in the midnight mirror. The best of those nights, she follows me back to bed and we spend the precious fleeting minutes talking in my dreams like sisters have always done. She always sends me safely back to being awake by the morning, even though she knows I’d gladly stay.
There are pictures of me where I clearly see my mom. It’s the cheeks to chin that really gives us away as mother and daughter. No one asked me, but I think I look the most like mom out of us three. Every time I write my name, I am practicing magic. The only time I’ve liked my name is when it is in mom’s handwriting. Maybe, if I could just get the first letter to look the way she writes it…if I could coax a plant to bloom for years, if the meal I copy from childhood sends me back in time to blue carpets and wood paneled walls, my impossibly small body would drag a firmly clutched stuffed animal down the long dark hall to stand at the bedroom doorway, where time would stretch out in the way it only does for children, and slowly in the quietest of little girl steps, my impossibly small body would sneak itself into the bed and under blankets to the safest place: mom’s side when…
The oldest of us was my beauty icon when I hadn’t yet figured out the words but understood the feeling of wonder and knew they felt the same. It was an unkind fate that placed us twelve years apart so I couldn’t steal her clothes or ask her to tell me about boys or eyeliner—I wouldn’t have listened. Had you seen her in the nineties you would have envied the way her hair swept her forehead perfectly. She had the baggy button-down shirt style that was between meticulously planned grunge of teens who grow up in trailers and sprezzatura. Nearly thirty-four years into my own life, I still see her as that cool teenager when she smiles and laughs. It is a laugh so freely given that makes the endless struggles a constant companion; life has a bitter and wryly clever sense of equilibrium—sprezzatura.
“Boo” was the last message my closest sister sent to me. No one knows how desperately they want to be haunted until they unequivocally learn that they can’t be. I’m really just haunting myself, when I look in the mirror searching for her face in mine because it feels unfair that I saw her last.
Our mom calls me, “my beauty” and I never questioned it. Having not seen me in years, an aunt once said, “you’ve become so beautiful” but it didn’t feel like anything special because mom made me feel that wonder of myself my entire life with two impossibly small words to contain something equally impossibly large. The beauty my aunt meant was only a small portion of what I knew mom meant.
My sister hugs with all her heart and I’ve never learned to give mine without feeling shy. I’ve never been as brave as her to give too much of myself. She heals like cooling lava, creating new land and giving it away.
Someday I will build a house of mirrors for myself so I could see every bit of them that’s been given to me. Some will say I should try being me instead of forcing three women to show themselves on my face. But how could I be me if they hadn’t come before to lovingly shape me into existence? I have always been me because they gave so much for me to be.
