Lullaby for Lianne

November nine years ago, I lost my mother, tragically. I recently had coffee with someone who knew the same woman I knew, and felt like I may have the strength to write this morning. No levity this time, apologies. Only the raw, hurt surface and the person trapped beneath it.

Being able to write is a big step. It’s also terrifying, and I’m having a hard time anticipating your reactions.

I don’t intend to make a habit of this kind of piece - on most days, I deliberately and painstakingly choose joy. Sometimes, however, you just have to watch the hurt come, close your eyes and steady yourself for the cataclysmic onslaught until it recedes.

Maybe this speaks to you, and if so, may we find peace.

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I thought I smelled your perfume this morning. It ran by and I tried to hold it back but my grip was weak. The ache burns from the ground up and reduces everything to ashes. I’m tired of having to rise over and over again. I’ll do it anyway, but I’m tired.

I’m still incredulous when I think about your disappearing into the night and then being found gone. Who wrote this unlikely script, who imagined this impossible series of events, who’s responsible for this preposterous outcome? At night, you sometimes return to me, and I understand that it was all a farce. Sometimes you tell me you had to leave to protect me. There’s always something malevolent about your eyes, though, and I realize it isn’t really you, but not before the fear tightens its grip on my throat and cuts off my air supply.

The trajectory of my breath gets compressed by the goddamn pain. I can’t dilute it because I would need to spread it around so that it got thin enough to see through, and frankly who the hell would understand and lay willingly beneath its toxic surface, after all this time?

I don’t mean to blaspheme. I remember your reading the Bible even though you were an atheist.

You lived in your head. It caged you in the end and it’s trying to draw me in but I’ve resolved only to give myself glimpses every now and then. I used to love that space, and I still find it beautiful but I think I’m on safer ground out here. Your patterns of thought were too sinuous and it was, I guess, easy to get lost.

I’d like to know why I never hear from you when I speak out loud. I think you can make out the desperation in my voice. I wonder if I’m too corporeal, too petrified to reach you. Sometimes your silence makes me think of love as a fine and fragile thread whose chemistry can get scrambled in a single, irregular heartbeat. I hide these conversations with the void from others.

The alienating nature of suffering is what makes it so devastating, on the one hand. On the other is knowing that I’ll never be completely free of it.

I wonder when I’ll be able to look back through a filter that highlights all the good elements and throws the grim parts that ruin the composition into complete obscurity. Maybe I just need to adjust my focus. For the moment, all the wrong angles are sharpened and keep stabbing me in the ribs.

I can still feel your breast against my cheek and the rise and fall of your breath as you read to me. In the end, the softness melted from you and left a jagged, unfamiliar shape. The rigid coldness of your flesh when I touched you that final time still haunts me.

It’s been another life since you left. There was a before and there’s an after, your death being my own personal version of the advent of Christ. The period After Death has left me fragile, fearful, weak. I’m an unconvincing simulacrum of my former self. If left untethered, my thoughts run madly off like the horsemen of the Apocalypse. I’m forever looking for ways to anchor them to an immovable surface but the ground is always shifting beneath my feet.

I imagine my pain as an unnatural thing.

You wrote for me when I was small enough to lay against your breast and your love was impenetrable, keeping us both safe. The beauty of your handwriting deftly illuminates the beauty of your mind, which unravelled in the end like Lachesis’s thread. Such was my fate.

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Lullaby for Lianne

Hear the wind sing and watch the wind blow;

Hesperus is rising; the moon is aglow.

Sit your dolls up and tuck your elves in

accomplices they to the tales we will spin.

Mother and child on the rocker will fly

to catch shooting stars with a lullaby.

Hear the wind sing and watch the wind blow;

starlight is sifting the new-fallen snow.

From corners and shelves timid fairies do peep

and dance to the hum of the lyrics of sleep.

Ladybugs bring you your wishes to bed

and Lachesis sits by measuring thread.

Hear the wind sing and watch the wind blow;

lace frosted windows glimmer and glow.

Lean your head gently and echo your trust

into magical boxes sprinkled with dust.

Tired and weary now whisper a sigh

and kiss me goodnight in your lullaby.

Hear the wind softly and watch the wind rise

blanketed under the musical skies.

Mommy