Mom

On Valentine’s Day I sat at the bar with my friend Anita with a foreboding sense that tomorrow my whole life would change forever. So, I prepared myself (as much as one can) for whatever lay ahead, sipped my wine, and savored the peace of the moment. The next morning, I begged fate to let me stay in bed. Then Audrey’s text message came in telling me that our friend Kelly was taken off of life support. Kelly was only a few years older than me, and it was her second brain aneurysm a month prior that ultimately killed her. I sat up with a start and uttered the word,” Fuck!” and that’s when the phone rang. It was Dr. Eisenbach, and he needed to talk to my mom. Five minutes later she called me into her room with an expression of stunned terror on her face. She told me that she had Acute Myeloid Leukemia and that she had to get to Duke University Hospital that day. It was Thursday. Mom was in a state of shock. As she waited for her friend to give her a ride up to Durham, she tried to find the strength to fight cancer for a third time. She had already won two battles with breast cancer and now there were no odds in her favor, and she knew it. Mom couldn’t acknowledge me when I said goodbye and that I loved her; she could only walk one step forward towards the backseat of the car. I think she believed that if she said goodbye to me or her faithful dog Duke that it would have been her death sentence. I wasn’t strong enough to watch her drive away, so I turned and went upstairs. Duke sat on the landing for weeks waiting for her return. I went to my room, and I cried and screamed into my pillow. Like a selfish asshole, the only thing I could allow myself to think about was how it wasn’t fair to me to take care of the house, four dogs, and my stepfather who is a diabetic with Alzheimer’s and a functioning alcoholic. That Sunday, we video chatted with mom, and she looked healthier after her blood transfusion. Her spirits were high, but her cough was getting worse. On Monday, she ignored my text messages. On Wednesday, she called, but her cough was so bad that she had difficulty speaking. That was our last conversation. I didn’t want to believe that it was going to be the last time I spoke with her, but deep down in my heart I knew that I needed to tell her how much I loved her and that she didn’t need worry about me and my brother if she had to leave us. Her departing words to me were “I love you.” She even programmed her phone to tell me that she loves me every time I power it up. That evening mom was put into intubation to control her respiration, but we had no idea that she would never wake up again. It had only been six days since her diagnosis. On Friday, I got the call from my stepsister that I needed to get to Durham with my stepfather and that my brother and his wife had better make arrangements to fly in from their home in Europe. When I received that message, I began to shake uncontrollably and my arms went completely numb. I couldn’t accept that we were actually going to lose her. When I saw mom in the Intensive Care Unit she was on a ventilator and her appearance was feverish and pasty. She had no less than twelve tubes going into her arms, and she looked awful, but her toenails were perfectly pedicured and fire engine red. Mom always dressed to the nines; she would have been embarrassed by her appearance. I caressed her swollen hand, and she responded with a quiver. I whispered in her ear, and her eyes opened halfway in her unconscious state. She tried so hard to wake up for me, to see me once more. Mom was always the problem solver and the nurturer, so I had to pretend like I was strong enough to cope with all of this. Most days I feel like I am still pretending. I tried to give her comfort with my words; I even joked about what a pain in the ass her husband could be. At that time, we still had hope that her test results would indicate that she was only fighting an infection, not the leukemia. When the weekend was over, I returned to my life and adopted responsibilities, and then we got mom’s test results. They were not good. Her leukemia had metastasized in her lungs and cranium and nothing could be done to save her. The oncologist said that mom knew she was sick but chose to pass it off as depression and exhaustion. In retrospect, I should have been more insistent that she go to the doctor sooner when she told me about her occasional dizzy spells, loss of appetite, and confusion. One night in late November, I found her on her hands and knees on the kitchen floor trying to pick up nothing. When I asked her if she was alright she replied, ”buz I was try to don know bout why iz has to bazzdid.” I thought she might have been having stroke, but I passed it off because she came to rather quickly, and I knew that she had two glasses of wine and an Ambien that night. Even if she had gone to the doctors the next day, it still wouldn’t have been enough time to save her. From her annual blood test, we now know that she developed leukemia within less than a year. On Saturday, March 3, 2018, I waited for my brother and his wife to arrive and we sat in the calm silence of surrender. I had no choice but to accept my mother’s inevitable death because that afternoon we were taking her off of life support.

In the Intensive Care Unit, I spent time with her holding her hand, caressing her hair, and resting my forehead against hers. I thanked her for being my mom and for always loving and caring for me. I cried a thousand tears and told her how much I loved her and that I would miss her immeasurably. My family gathered around her and we laughed and cried and told wonderful stories about her life and how special she was to each of us. As I sat there, I observed life happening all around us. Everything was in perfect harmony and balance. In that moment of quiet stillness when she took her last breath, I stepped out of my discomfort and achieved a clarity of perception that gave me solace by simply being present and mindful. When it was time to leave, I kissed her tenderly on the forehead and whispered goodbye.

Yellow Like Sunshine

I write love poems for a living, even when I am not in love.

I think, sometimes, that’s the hardest part about being a traveling typewriter poet—young couples are always looking to buy a poem about their partner. Sometimes, it’s fine, but other times I want to be bitter, or perhaps, make a sign that reads no love poems, angry poems only. It’s embarrassing to be clicking and clacking on the typewriter’s keys, crafting romance on a piece of 4x6 paper, thinking only about how awful your love life is compared to the love of these two strangers. The best part is when their partner has the same name as an ex lover of mine. Those are my favorite.

One Saturday, though, I was in a local art market somewhere in downtown Wilmington, and a man approached my table with his daughter. He looked older—different from the younger couples I normally wrote love poems for, but nonetheless, still looking for a typewriter poem for his wife.

When his daughter left to browse at the other vendors, I went through the normal routine of my love poem process, asking questions like how did you two meet? What do you love about her? What do you like doing together?

“Oh, we love traveling with each other,” he said, answering one question. “Drinking wine. Eating good food. Even just staying home with a bowl of popcorn and a good movie.”

I always asked one specific question. Sometimes I used it in the poems, but most of the time I was just curious.

“What color does she remind you of and why?” I asked.

This question was the aha moment of every relationship; it was the realization this stranger had about their lover. How they saw them. How they truly felt about them. Sometimes, people said their partner’s favorite color: “red—that’s his favorite.” But, no, I wanted to tell these people that I needed the real shit; I needed them to rack their brains and tell me what kinda love this was. How this person made them feel. What was the color that dripped from their eyeballs and down their arms and connected their souls together? What was that color? Not their favorite color, but that color.

And, for a moment, he just stood there, like the question really mattered to him, so he lost himself in thought. I looked around, too, so I wasn’t just staring at him staring at the wall behind me. I didn’t notice the tears forming in his eyes until I heard him sniffle.

“Yellow—she’s my sunshine.”

I suddenly felt tears forming in my eyes, as if I knew his wife too, as if I also had someone who loved me so much the thought of them just brought me to tears. But I didn’t, and I remembered I didn’t know this woman, but it was clear how his love for her dripped from his eyes and down his cheeks, and I wanted to cry with him. Cry of happiness for him. Cry of sadness for me. Cry of heartbreak for all the times my younger self waited for a moment like this to happen to her—it never did, and in a way, that moment between me and this stranger was healing. He gave me hope that it would happen. That he really saw her as his sunshine. Not because yellow was her favorite color, because she was the color yellow. She was sunshine.

I wrote the poem, and I didn’t see him pick it up. I thought his daughter did. I walked away to get water before I could catch either one of them. I hoped his wife liked it. I hoped she cried with him. I hoped she saw him in the same way as I did: a man in love with her yellow light.

my sunshine

my little sunshine,

i celebrate our love

when we clink

our glasses of wine,

and with a bag of popcorn

and your soul

by my side,

i wish i could freeze

this moment of time.

i’ve dreamt about calling

a woman like you

all mine.

h.w.

Love and Late Nights in the Marvel Cinematic Universe

Two months into my first relationship, we started watching a Marvel movie every night. He lived with seven other people, and we had access to Disney+ so we decided to make our way through the Marvel Cinematic Universe. My boyfriend and I were able to find 15 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour alone, but no more. This time was foundational, but our time never belonged to us. That’s where the silence started. We both loved movies and more importantly, we loved watching movies together, but we never spoke during the movie. Soon, that was all we did together. Lay in a bed side by side and watch movies. Sit in the living room of his apartment with his roommates and watch movies. But I got to be close to him and I felt more at home than I ever have before when my head was on his chest, and he’d kiss me.

The first movie was Captain America the First Avenger. This is Cap’s origin story.

I’ll never forget when you kissed me on the side of my head that first day. I met you in Wilmington, at Wrightsville Beach access ten. The sun was beginning to set; the waves moved as if they wanted to engulf us in our own world, but the water didn’t need to because we were already in a world we would never come to understand. Two weeks later, you asked me to be your girlfriend. A year and a half later we’ve slipped away from each other and become parts of our own oceans. The way we should’ve been all along.

Steve Rogers was rejected from military service because his frame didn’t match that of other warriors. He volunteered for a project that was testing the success of super-soldier serum which could help him get the muscle he needed to serve, creating Captain America. His strength was almost intoxicating. His evolution was against all laws of nature.

My first boyfriend loved movies. He loved the way films worked, including the composition of the pictures, sound, editing, and directing. He loved fear so much that he became it, the total embodiment of a man terrified to take the wrong step. He loved stories almost as much as I do, but film was his passion. He was curious and invested in us, at least at the beginning, and in his friendships, but never in himself. His bedroom walls were covered with movie posters of Spider-Man, Star Wars, Marvel, and a black and white poster of The Shining that I bought him for our first Christmas together. The walls surrounding him were unbreakable. His mind wrangled in art. His internal battle was silent. The worst kind of battle to fight alone. You were never alone, my love. Not intentionally. That’s the first thing I would’ve done differently.

A week ago, a girl lost her love. A girl who has never lost a love before. Not like this. One night. One moment and she was silenced by fear. This silence she was used to. A year and a half long relationship ends in three minutes and forty-two seconds. A boy and a girl, in love. A boy. And. A girl, still in love but desperate to let go of each other.

There was a girl; she was made of the ocean. She attracted the tides, the moon’s control, the colors at sunset, the storms, the depth, and the unknown. Her soul was a secret even to her. Many could find her down by the water asking the ocean for more. More knowledge. More safety. More love. Until, one day the ocean gave her what she asked for. A love made of water with a boy made of fear. Soon they would be mirror images of each other which would cause their love to run so deeply because they knew and for them knowing was enough. Even a love that deep couldn’t last.

She loved to create, and the boy loved movies, so their minds were similar pieces of art that either brought creativity or destruction with them.

Captain America fights the Red Scull and Hydra. The main point of the film is that Captain America is worth paying attention to. This film focuses on the origin story of a scrawny kid who lacks the power and means to make the personal impact he wants to make.

The boy was no different. He loved the girl on a level he wasn’t sure he could maintain. She wanted more. Z’s love came inconsistently and only stayed when they were together making it nearly impossible for the girl to be alone.

There was a boy made of movies who thought in graphic novels of Marvel superheroes and Spider-Man. Who loved laughing and pretending. Who loved dogs and lived for many days at a time with a mind ready to kill. A mind much like mine. Except his mind was silent or on a loop of indescribable doubt that makes silence hurt so much worse because he couldn’t give it a name.

If you saw me a week and a half ago, I was in love. If you see me today, I am on the run. A week goes by and Chronos, the Greek God of Time, checks his watch, nothing. To Chronos, time was just a name, and power lived inside him. He didn’t need to seek it; he was a titan, the king of the titans. That was his power. Z was a twenty-year-old boy whose life had not belonged to him for a day, and he was still searching for his power. Two weeks go by and Chronos checks his watch again. Z wants to talk.

This story is set in Charlotte, NC, and Wilmington, NC. The opening scene takes place in Charlotte. His childhood home is small, warm, and quiet, too quiet. I walked in for the first time as a quiet girl who was welcomed, but there were so many more walls in that house than I could even see. He went to Porter Ridge High School. She went to Davidson Day School. One hour away from each other, their lives would never meet unless they needed to.

He was skinny, quiet, and awkward. He made friends. That was easy for him his authenticity, his love, and the fact that he needed more from himself, and his family attracted people to him. Especially people who were the same as he was. The simplicity of his energy drew people closer to him. She made friends too, but there was nothing simple about her. Her complexity drew people close and turned people away all at once.

Captain America became a warrior overnight. A fighter, but his heart gets in his way. He has one goal, but his heart wants something else. Once he joins the Avengers, his goal is written for him. There’s a disconnect here that would split any soul in half. The person he wants to be and the person he feels like he needs to be for someone he loves.

When I moved into my freshman dorm on the fourth floor of Pelican Hall, he lived on the first floor. We met on September 1, two weeks into college. Days were spent in his room; nights were spent on the pier. By September 12, I was hooked, and he asked me to be his girlfriend on the beach where we met. He’d hold my hand or kiss my cheek, and I knew this was something more than past pain that molded me into a person who thought love could only be one way.

There was something missing. Even in the early days, I could feel a space between us that I desperately tried to fill by simply being around him. Which worked for a while, until I felt like I was becoming too much, but this feeling didn’t keep me away. I was pushed away by him and by myself. Months later, I’d push myself away from him, and a little more and a little more before even to me we were just existing in each other’s lives and that may have been the first step.

Four months into our relationship, his roommate started flirting with me over Snapchat. It got to the point that his roommate was talking to me more than my boyfriend ever had. I mentioned it to him, but he didn’t take it seriously. And I was back to believing based on actions that I loved him more than he ever loved me. One night in late February, his roommate’s confidence in pursuing me became something I was afraid of, and he knew that. But it was the perfect situation for him. Scared girl, been through this before, silenced by insecurity that the boy’s roommate wasn’t the cause of. His roommate prayed on me the way you stalk something you want to kill. And he killed me in every way I could’ve been killed without letting myself become a memory too. That was my breaking point. The girl he met on the beach was consumed by the need to escape from the body of a girl touched by a monster. Once I realized the truth about the way I was feeling, the guilt I had for no longer feeling like the girl he fell in love with was a loneliness I didn’t know how to talk about.

Captain America was far away at this point. Memories of Marvel nights were just memories of sitting next to a guy who took my body and a guy, my love, who didn’t know how to get it back. Memories of the beach the night I met him were the only things that allowed me to breathe in that apartment. I needed to act like myself just to hold onto myself. My warrior, my love, was cut down by a betrayal from a roommate he called a friend.

My body ached sitting next to Z’s roommate day after day, but my heart ached sitting next to someone lost to inaction and guilt all his own. We’d lost each other that day because we made the decision to survive on our own instead of surviving on our own and together. That was the conversation that needed to be had, not the conversation of why. I felt safe in that apartment because you were close by. Your fingers were entangled with mine, my head on your chest my greatest connection to our love that stuck until the last night. All the while someone else was watching me.

The summer after I lost my body in your apartment, we went to Pawley’s Island. A chance to remember the love we created. We never lost love. I lost myself and therefore forgot who I was in relation to our love. I needed a reminder. To reconnect with our love that originated in the ocean’s eyes and the force of water pushing us closer together. But it was easier to pretend I was okay to pretend my heart was okay. I knew you’d never ask questions if I pretended my heart had healed. Our hearts belonged on the beach because that’s where we were connected and that’s where my heart connected with yours. I fell in love with you repeatedly on that beach. I fell in love with your touch, your heart, your anxiety, the beauty in your eyes when you looked at me. The way it felt lying in bed with you your arms wrapped around me as my only source of safety and relief from the water inside me that was ready to drown me.

I thought I’d have a new Avenger, but you were never able to understand the pain and I wasn’t in a place that I could help you understand the way the pain moved inside me. It was just beneath the skin running deeper every day taking another piece of my body every day. I believed it needed to run its course, so I was letting it while convincing myself that because you were unable to act one time that you would never be able to protect me. There was one impossible situation that neither of us knew how to handle or come back from, but we should’ve worked together to find a path through.

I needed you to show me you loved me.

I needed you to be present over the summer to help me work through.

I needed to be able to be around someone who felt more like home than being back home ever could. And you did, but it was only you.

Everything I said afterwards was to try to reconnect with you after that summer. I didn’t realize it until much later. That losing myself had the chance of me losing you too even if you weren’t gone. I willed a separation and that was what happened with us. I fought because I was fighting for a past version of myself more so than fighting with you. Most of the fights we had were about the past, not about our personalities.

I’d say we became a movie, but that would be a lie. We became a mystery in a relationship that was in every way full of love, yet broken down by impossibilities. In the last few months, we stopped talking. In the last few days, you stopped touching me. And in the final day, the morning before we ended, you told me you loved me, and it felt like you never did. We got used to being around each other, but never with each other and maybe that was our relationship. Presence in each other’s lives, loving as deeply as I thought I could, but we were silent and I couldn’t be, not with you, my love.

Cap got his shield back from Tony Stark and their friendship was rebuilt in minutes, but time is another thing we have no control over. Time will eat you up inside if you let it. It will tear you apart waiting for your life to start or for this love to fall away, in time. I guess time is helpful, but I never gave you yours. Two weeks, two months, four months, a year, I love you. Chronos and I will be checking the time every day. 5 o’clock I’d walk over to your apartment. 8 o’clock dinner. 5 o’clock I’m alone in my apartment 8 o’clock sorry I’m not hungry anymore. This love belongs to time now in ways it never belonged to us, and I will ask Captain America to avenge us as we fall away once again. After the Endgame (2019), Captain America is also one of the fallen.

We never got our Endgame (2019).