The Immigrant

The Immigrant

 Dear Ian,

Week long ice storm, and as you know, your Cousin Courtney and her fiancé Kevin were here for a few days, skidding in from Wimberley and harboring here with me. I haven't really been around her in years, since the days when the two of you played. 

Since that time in the world.  

She is a lovely person, but it was like meeting a stranger. 26 years old and moving on with her life and her career and the promise of love and family to come. 

It reminded me of the chasm. 

The two continents of me.

There is my homeland; where I came from.

Geographic memory sparks it to life in my dreamtime...

Memories of my noisy house, children running and making the messes that I would die to see again. The land of you, Chris, Kenzie...... Courtney and her sisters...seasons when we all gathered at the coast and she ate oysters raw and you ate crackers and spray cheese...holding the sacrament of them high in the air for the gulls. Sun burned cheeks and beach walks  at dusk looking for crabs. You tied a chicken leg on a string to lure them out. The smell of sand and sunscreen and sweaty boy like incense.

 Like love. 

It's a long ago world now......

 

 A completely different language, 

Another life.

 

Talking to Courtney as we stayed inside and watched the wind howl, snow

blowing and swirling....I could see her young face in her older face but

I found I could not go there, to talking about those childhood years together.

 It is too unsettling. 

Too vast a chasm to traverse with her.

Dangerous to let myself draw a breath from that air. 

My new land is gradually taking form; the sand is filling in the years, as I know it must. The days and weeks and months and years ticking by without you have changed my landscape, without you here to breath your essence into this iteration; to add your noises and essence to my talks with Courtney. Nor your laugh. You are not here to talk about your wedding plans or career or to laugh at the things happening in our world.

The stampeding of time is happening without you to see or hear it with human senses; new music, new tv shows, new politics...that you and I will never share or talk about. Your brother is over 30, will likely get grey hair soon, and Kenzie is following, too. I meet stupid new people that I cannot make fun of with you, because you are still back in my home world, or you are in another world. 

I am an immigrant, slowly becoming accustomed to a new home, a new language for things. It odd that I know so many people now that never knew you. Bridget, Kevin, Jean, Beth, Carrie, Kathy, Hudson. They only know you through the eyes of my pain.

For a while, I tried to pull you forward with me to this place and keep the memories in my daily path. It was like speaking my native tongue in a foreign city, or cleaving to old traditions from the loneliness of leaving my best life behind. I hoped it would preserve who we were, my little family, in suspended animation or something.

But even this is beginning to slip away now. I made a blackberry cobbler yesterday and hardly even thought of you, and except for a few moments when feeding the chipping sparrows, you were not in my mind as it snowed.

 Not so much. 

hardly felt you at all, even though I love you as fiercely as the furious cold outside.

It is just to hard too live in two lands all the time. 

Too sad. 

Too fucking painful to call up the images.

Too much ache with longing. 

So I have dug a mote, I have filled it with deep azure water;

 I have put away some of the pictures,

 I don't listen to your videos or touch your clothes anymore.

 I avoid your closet and cannot stand to let my eyes meet yours in any of the photos that are scattered about our house. I am not letting myself dream of our home world anymore.

 Who knows why or for how long this will last.

Maybe, eventually I will find a way balance the love of my two different lives, like porcelain plates on sticks above my head. 

Maybe I will be that old lady on her death bed,

Who surrenders reality and retreats

Back to the beauty

And bliss 

Of her native tongue;

Her past

The Homeland...As she rides the final ship off and away.

                                                                                                     Love,

                                                                                                      Mom