A Momento Mori

A Momento Mori Artwork Sonia Zanatta Words Tabitha Lean

Sometimes I imagine my mother is sitting at the end of my bed. Her back is slightly curved and her sparrow frame cradles itself around her crimson, red heart. Her delicate hands rest upon her pale knees, petite legs crossed, naked feet slightly tapping to a silent melody. Her eyes are blue. Not an azure blue, more a sunny sky blue. The kind of blue that fluffy clouds rest against. A kind of faded out blue, like a cornflower coloured dress left on the line in the summer sun. Flecks of light ricochet off her blonde locks. A golden crown framing her gentle face Her lips would crease into a mini smilejust an ever so little curve of her mouth, but just enough to reach her eyes. One hand would absently smooth out unseen creases in my beddingas if her hand so soft and gentle could iron out the rough and tumble of midnight slumber. I think I’d be little… yes - about three or four. I’d be made up of all soft edges yet to be hardened by men or the burdens of lifeall doe eyed and playfuldreaming of fairies and wizards and pixiesyet to know the burden of loss and grief and failure and painfree of capitalist shackles and patriarchal demands and colonial confines and all the vagaries of life. I imagine that just before I am to submit to rest she’d softly sing in a quiet voice, as she pulled the covers up to my chin. I’d be safe and warm and loved. I’d close my eyes unafraid of the monsters that creep in the dark, unaware that nightmares exist in the waking hours, or that dreams can go entirely unrealised. This would be a time way before hope is dashed, or cynicism grew along all my bones like mould spores spreading into lungs. It would be a time where my heart held love and knew no ragea time where my spirit soared and I could be me-

an authentic me, not the me with my corners cut off, not the me origami’d into every other shape than my own just to fit someone’s image of me. So different from the me that was brought into this world. The me that loves and laughs and believes in fairy tales and happily every aftersthe me that is fun and quirky and gets all too carried away with the whimsy of lifethe me with my hurricane mind and my poet’s heart. But all of this is a tale of my own creation… a story that rests in my soul bones. Because as I stroke the little porcelain plate once held in my mother’s hands, I have to dream up memories to nestle in my mitochondriabecause I have no memory of her voice, her skin or her smileI know not what filled her heart with joy or dread. I only know her nameher name that settles so easily on my lipsher name which is never mum or mama, but always Glenys. It is in these moments that I imagine she’s not dead. I soothe myself thinking about the transference of energy. Energy that never dies. Energy that can only be transformed. I tell myself that it’s what the body does when it diesit alters form. And I figure, existence could be eternal, right? Surely the tragedy of her death, the very pain of her demise, that is etched upon every one of my bones, and all of her hopes and wishes and desires unfulfilled and left discarded on that long road along with every single litre of her blood as she bled out and expelled her very last breath while cradled in my father’s arms I let those scars serve as a symbolic reminder of the inevitability of my deatha memento mori, if you will. And I imagine… because it’s all that I can do.