3 minute read
II) pining
My response perfectly bland.
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That’s Her. That’s the She. Mother.
Remembering that I am human and on the phone with my human sister, I come back to truth unfazed. I am the Nietzsche fan in the family after all. Sister is 12 nineteen years my senior and in many ways my antithesis, for someone who’s been through it, that is. Admittedly, I am jealous of her for reasons beyond my grasp of the written word. She approaches the world differently than I would ever dare. Sometimes, you can’t even tell…
The sharp incompatibility of my high, the sun, and my straight edge sibling presents itself. I reluctantly shake myself awake because she does not probably know the extent of my new grief given habits.
Simone DeBeauvoir reveals an obsessive divinity and absorption she felt toward her mother post death. She admits, “Her death like her birth will remain in some legendary time.”13 I imagine my mother as godly lately... probably because I am godless, I have no rituals, I don’t know where She went. My only excuse for thinking about god is that It’s almost Easter.
You look exactly like your mom.
Distant relatives and strangers alike try and appease me. Is this what normal people think I want to hear? Imagine being lovingly obsessed and absolutely terrified of a visage. Riley suggests that you die along with your loss, but then the spirit of the deceased jumps you.
12
Friedrich Nietzsche is credited with the introduction of Nihilism, the rejection of then christian centric religion and morals. In her essay Deviant Payback, Avital Ronell shares that many philosophers of the time had Neitzche figured as a woman, in fact, a scolding mother. I’m sure this will come up again.
13 De Beauvoir, A Very Easy Death, 20.
“You are cut down, and yet you burn with life…” 14
I look in the mirror and turn into her subconsciously, more and more with each passing day.
I love it.
Explain that duality. Explain how eerie. Explain the enervation of that daily reminder. Her, skin thin like homemade paper, eyes overcast grey.
“It is something Ineffable about my mother that I search for What I want is amber green glass and gold, like her eyes. Our eyes.” 15
I find uncomfortable peace knowing I am not the only one consumed with a visage. I have decided the reminder comes from the long hair I have let grow since She left me. I twirl the length between my fingertips. “Is this why I cut my hair so close to my head, so that when I look in the mirror I see my dying mother?”16 I had short hair all my life. The image starts to provoke me. I stop chopping it the week she dies. I let it grow relentlessly. It should be longer. It feels like an eternity ago.
“Hair.is.everything.”17 Fleabag claims, she’s the personification of unprocessed grief in popular culture. She’s a double whammy when it comes to loss, her best friend and her mother. I saw a live version of the play when I first moved here. The audience especially erupts during the therapy scenes, where Fleabag admits she may be using humor and sex as a deflection. Friends tell me I’m funny like Fleabag, but I can see that her erratic behavior, the unstableness that the public has fallen madly in love with, is fueled by loss. I don’t seem to get the same reaction when I go out fucking, drugging, and stealing sculptures. I stare at myself in the reflection of my telephone. Sister hung up a long time ago.
14
Riley, Say Something Back/Time Lived Without Its Flow, 76. There’s a confusion between life and death here, I don’t feel her spirit. But I do see it. Maybe only because I want to.
15 Kate Zambreno, Book of Mutter (South Pasadena: Semiotext(e), 2017)135. Everything becomes a projection of loss.
16 Zambreno, Book of Mutter, 128.
17 Waller-Bridge, Fleabag, 361.
