When does mom leave? | newspaper

I scrub the marble, close the shutters, wash the curtains. I don’t think you’d want me to do this kind of work, but I often get overwhelmed anymore. I definitely wanted to wear gloves so as not to spoil my hands, and of course I didn’t. Only in the end your joy made sense to me and then I started wearing the things you bought me. When I saw you. Now I wear them all. Not the ones you bought for me. your own clothes. You must have forgotten the leather cloak, it was a sixties thing, you told me that when you pressed me with your love to wear it, I didn’t want to wear it, it was now my favorite, one of my favorite things. All my favorites now. For many years I have been running from you and one such death was enough for me not to want to run from you. To find the fixed time.

For nearly two years now, I’ve been going back and forth to your house to make sure nothing has changed. To clear things up and give Caesar to Caesar, the brown pleated skirt to Vasu who loved you, the “goodie bag,” Chanel, to Chrysa to remember you. Do things ever clear up? Can anyone do that? I will be late mom. I promise I will be late.

Closet after locker I take out the contents, evaluate, sort, wipe down, making sure that the house I come close to every time isn’t locked. I fondly embrace the stories that emerge from loaded drawers, for none of them are generally very interesting, the relationship with them purely personal, and who can touch them with the affection which all these stories need but the man who looks to the conclusion of the world, the world he has shaped? To look with absurd tenderness at the cables and dozens of batteries because they, in the way of sudden and strange memory, are connected to the moment in which you declared “But is it possible that not a single person can find a single battery in one house?” In that order and with a genuine question we momentarily recognized your appearance and we all laughed. Then she started laughing too. Laugh your hearty, sincere, girlish laughter. Battery as Madeleine Brostien.

For many years I have been running from you and one such death was enough for me not to want to run from you. To find the fixed time.

How did one man get so many extension cords, so many batteries and pools, and how did this quick stab of sympathy at the cutlery come to me when I opened the pyrex cupboard? How do so many things become just a thin film separating us from death? How much is needed to create a permanent barrier against what is to come and also against any dynamics of the present?

I’m still not sure who I’ve become but now I have to let go of all the “record” I’ve kept of who I am, of what I was year after year: the excessive love of animals you recorded in your kindergarten journals (which used to bother you but still bothers you), and aversion to dolls (which used to bother you too but you made up your mind), hobbies (guitar, batik, painting, jewelry making, writing – I loved everything and everything, except writing, was given up in time). Each new stage of development brought a new set of interests expressed, fatally, in things, in concrete matter. I have kept everything. Strange when I think you urged me to throw away, not keep “material” memories, clothes I don’t wear, utensils I don’t use. Another expression of tender hypocrisy for “saving me” from something. I found books that were no longer interested in me, writings that I thought I had gotten rid of, things that represented who I thought I would become, things that represented who I was and am not. I decided to let them go, because who in the world will understand their meaning when I am gone too? But why should the beloved “liquidator” undergo the past-meaning test once and for all? Or a stranger falls into the traps that memory makes by forcing connections back and forth, mixing important and unimportant to retrieve God knows best (oops! I was cleaning the house of a lady who died and that reminded me…). Throw the best.

But you, the breakup didn’t even cross your mind. Perhaps it was a truer case of my “struggle for independence” which brings me to the point – your daughter more than ever – to receive drops of silly silly anxiety, signs of open reckoning: Did I dress you right? Right shoes – wrong shoes? Is the blouse still in place or is it starting to dissolve? Does the jacket match the skirt? I did my combo on you for the first time. Did you do it right, mom? do you agree? and me; Am I dressed well? Do I wear warm clothes? Your voice corrects the prop: “Beautiful what you wear.”

When does mom leave?