What We Lose(33)

Anyway, give little M a kiss and a high five. Stay STRONG.

Love you LOTS

Xoxo,





~L


Every five, six weeks, I open up an envelope from my father and it contains a hundred-dollar bill or two, sometimes a check for five hundred. When M has the flu and has to go to the hospital, a thousand. But there is never enough money, never enough sleep.

M is an incredibly mischievous child. When he is acting up, when we are in the midst of the action, I would say that he is annoying. He is a pain in the ass. Before, I couldn’t bear the thought of him being taken away, but now, in my worst moments, I would gladly hand him over to a kidnapper, a kind, gentle kidnapper who would appear at my door and promise to take excellent care of my son. In my bad moments, I would give him over in a second.

I am able to find a one-and-a-half bedroom in Brooklyn after the breakup. I let Peter keep our old place out of guilt. He leaves the house while I pack my things; he is unable, still, to face me after my betrayal. I miss him; walking through the house, picking my things from his only makes me miss him more. I lose all of my baby weight from not eating. I long to see him, but I accept my excommunication as worthy punishment.

I send him a message one night. It takes me one hour to compose: Been thinking about you. Do you ever miss me? He never replies.

M’s room is a little windowless corridor—a section of my room, really—walled off by French doors. I have to walk through his room to get to the bathroom or kitchen, and at night I often tussle with myself over how badly I need to use the bathroom or eat an extra snack. Is it worth waking up the little monster and sacrificing another three hours of sleep? Usually, it is not, and I go to bed with my bladder bursting or stomach grumbling.

But then he looks at a book or the television with an intense curiosity I’m not sure anyone’s managed at his age, and I realize there is something in him that is limitless. He regards me in a way no one has ever done before: with complete and utter adoration and wonderment.

Even though oftentimes I am lonely, it also feels right, just him and me together in our little apartment.

When Peter is gone, his absence feels familiar. Yes, there is that dark, terrifying loneliness that scares me, but I am acquainted with fear. If I stay inside it long enough, root my heels in deeper, it doesn’t feel scary anymore. It feels like home.



When I am feeling overwhelmed, certain thoughts comfort me. Sometimes I am alone and the wind howls. I am lonely and feel that every day is just too much, that I am going to break. It is my prayer, to myself and the heaven that is in my mind, that looks like my childhood home on a winter’s day—a place warm and glowing with love and safety.

Some things have to go away, I tell myself. That is just the way it is.

I say this over and over in my head, until the feeling recedes. I repeat it like a prayer, when I look into M’s eyes or when I stand at my mother’s grave. Both sites are equally enormous; they terrify me equally but in opposite ways.

We are like bricks in a wall, and a new one cannot fit unless another is taken away.

It comforts me to peace, and M to sleep, this harmony, the idea that for every suffering there is equal and opposite joy. In practice, it is so simple, yet so mystical and infinite.



I am beginning to forget my mother. This is the sad truth. I wish, sometimes, for even a bad dream of her that I used to have. It would be preferable to this absence.

I will always be motherless. One day I will be fatherless. And one day after that, if all goes according to nature’s plan, M will be motherless.

I pray that I will never be childless.

She comes to me in snatches—I remember pieces of her laugh, the look she gave when she was upset. Sometimes I sniff the bottle of perfume of hers that I saved, but it doesn’t come close to the robustness of her smell. It is her, flattened.

This is what it’s really like to lose. It is complete and irreversible.

How pernicious these little things called memories are. They barbed me once, but now that I no longer have many of them, I am devastated.

I nuzzle M the way she used to nuzzle me. I tell him that I love him in Afrikaans, like she used to tell me. Why you talking funny, Mama? he asks, and looks even more confused when my tears fall onto his little head.

There could be love again; I can see the places where it might fit in my life. I may be ready to try.

I’ve amazed myself with how well I’ve learned to live around her absence. This void is my constant companion, no matter what I do. Nothing will fill it, and it will never go away.