“Jane Doe”
My mother’s body, and my fear of her body. I was always at odds. Both in love with her as fiercely and deeply as anything and grieving her already. Grieving her because I loved her, and strangely aware of how much time a lifetime can fall short of love and it’s visions. How the imagination of love can outrun our time living.
Even now, my love for her and fear for her is childish. I still hesitate. I look at her and her face.
I don’t think she even knows how much I love her. How much of myself I devoted to her when she smiled at me. She was my whole world. I could never want to look past her. I couldn’t even imagine past her, beyond her. I felt like a priest, and inside my heart as a baby, was a private little shrine. Just for her.
Where she went with God, I followed, too. Just behind her, loving her first and then God.
Under the light of the sun in the days of my infancy, her smile glittered on my eyes like light on the face of a lake.
Her tremendous life as a vicissitude. And these are indeed vicissitudes—I feel my love and fear for my parents change between themselves as though by the same winds which pull and gather the earth through the seasons.
And they are the same, these desperate, natural forces: attempts, in feeling, to stop time, while being even then a participant to the same, deft wholeness of movement— of that which moves. Attempts to quell a larger, quieter and bodiless motive, with a senseless, terrified shriek.
Do you know what it’s like to be inside? Isn’t it so wordless? How can I describe a love like that, an insidedness that is so thorough and catching and broad, being so tucked inside of love I could not fathom being outside of it. Isn’t that the circumstance of life? Being so inside you lose yourself to the want of words? Wanting an articulation that would only defeat its purpose. You are inside, how much more and what much more could you say to that? Of it? Words cannot reach here. They are powerless to being in that level of profundity. Sound falls apart out the mouth when you try.”
