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Bravey(6)
Author: Alexi Pappas

 

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   I have one good memory of my mother that I hold on to. It begins and ends in about four seconds, like a dream you try to keep when you first wake up but inevitably slips away as the day sets in. In the memory, I’m on the path that leads from our house to the lagoon where kids feed the ducks and I am riding my two-wheeler bike for the first time. As I pedal, I look back over my shoulder and I see my mother standing in the doorframe of our house watching me. She is actually watching me! She wears a sweat suit like always and she’s smoking a cigarette, but she is paying attention to me. The feeling of being watched is the next best thing to being touched. It’s like sunlight on your skin, as though the person watching you is giving you some part of themselves by way of their eyes.

       The memory stops when I look back and see her. I don’t really know what happened after that moment—I don’t know if I fell down, or if she turned and went back inside, or if I just rode away. What is important is the memory of her eyes on me. My dad later confirmed that my mother did indeed teach me how to ride a bike, so now in my mind I’ve added a part at the beginning where she pushes me in a grand send-off, hands hovering attentively over my shoulders to catch me if I fall. And even though I don’t know if that part is true, I’ve imagined it so many times that it feels true.

   I often imagine things into existence until I don’t know the difference between what is real and what isn’t, what doesn’t exist and what could exist if I believe it hard enough. I’ve visualized so many wonderful things into reality for myself. Becoming an Olympian took an extraordinary amount of hard work, but all it started with my belief that it could be true. Imagination, at the very least, brings us joy; at the very most, it empowers us to suspend disbelief and chase the impossible. Imagining things into existence is a superpower. The only sad part is that there will always be one thing I can never imagine into existence: having my mom back. But anything else is fair game.

 

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   One day my mother finally got away and did the thing she was trying to do. It was the middle of the night and we were all asleep. We’ve always been heavy sleepers in my family. But my dad woke up and realized she was gone, and when he searched the house he found a knife and blood on the floor of the downstairs bathroom. He would have probably been able to trace the blood to her body had it not been pouring rain outside. He called the security guards that patrolled our island city and they found her among the trees along the lagoon’s edge, right where everyone feeds the ducks, next to the path where she taught me to ride my bike.

   What gets me the most is that after she fatally cut herself, my mother made one last decision: She used her remaining strength to get out of the house where we were all asleep and go someplace to die where we wouldn’t find her body. This small fact makes all the difference in the world. I like to believe that even though she was gripped by anguish so severe that she wanted to die, her final thoughts were of protecting my dad, my brother, and me. For my mother, this gesture was as thoughtful as she could have been. It makes me so grateful and also so sad. I hold on to this thoughtfulness as tightly as I would have held on to her if I could.

 

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        Did you ever realize funeral has the word fun in it? The cemetery where we buried my mom was surrounded by these irresistible hills and I remember my brother, Louis, and I ran up and down the grassy slopes having a grand time. There were even ducks nearby, like the lagoon in our neighborhood. But here there were no moms and daughters out for strolls, just crying people. I wore a pretty dress that got very dirty and a single shiny earring. Before the funeral I had begged my dad to take me to get my ears pierced, but after one ear I decided it hurt too much and ran out of the store before they could finish the job.

   The congregation around my mother’s grave was the largest group of people I’d ever seen gathered on account of one person. Everyone was dressed in fancy clothes like we were all going to see The Nutcracker. But instead of watching dancers, it felt like everyone was watching me. The adults looked at me like I was a perfectly good bag of popcorn that had been forgotten in the microwave and burned to a crisp. I imagine they were thinking, This poor girl. How will she ever turn out okay? She doesn’t even have both ears pierced!

   After she died, there were many more people suddenly involved in our life. Before she died, it was easier to keep her condition quiet. Back then mental illness wasn’t handled openly with flowers and get-well cards like there might have been if she had been sick with cancer. My mother’s depression was easy to keep out of sight. Her side of the family was out of the picture, both before and after her death—when she was living they refused to acknowledge she was sick, and when she died nobody from her family even came to the funeral, except for her father—and so my dad was left on his own throughout my mom’s illness. But after she died my family’s secrets became public knowledge to everyone but me. I knew my mom had been unwell but I didn’t learn the exact details of her death until years later. At the time, I thought she died from smoking cigarettes. Nobody corrected my assumption.

       There was a flock of ladies who descended upon our house after the funeral. I still don’t know who they were or how they knew us. I’ve never asked my dad, and for years if any woman looked at me for a second too long, I’d wonder if she had been one of them. They were all dressed up and they drank wine and I thought we were having a party. But it wasn’t a party—it was a purging. They went through our house and stuffed everything that belonged to my mother in trash bags to be given away. These women were not just throwing my mother’s things away—they were trying to throw her away, to erase her. When I realized what was occurring, I became a thief. I secretly grabbed all that my little hands could carry, which only amounted to her fur coat, a pair of Gucci shoes, and one photo album. We also had to give away our two adorable pugs, Mugsy and Sushi, because they had been my mom’s dogs. My dad was working, and my brother and I were too young to be responsible for them. I wish I had been able to keep more of her clothes and other heirlooms, but I was denied this inheritance. I still wonder sometimes where my mom’s clothes ended up and who in the world is wearing them.

   The photo album I took dated back to my mother’s teenage years and includes many pictures of her with young men who are most definitely not my dad. She looked like a young Elizabeth Taylor. Some of the pictures had love notes written on the back. I would have liked to have more pictures of her with my family, but I also enjoyed daydreaming about what she was like in high school. I imagined what kind of teenager she was and if I would be like her when I was that age. She was pretty, and it seemed like lots of people liked her. Most of all, it seemed like she liked herself. I kept the photo album hidden in my closet along with her Gucci shoes, which seemed more like Christmas tree ornaments than shoes because her feet were so small. Her fur coat became my favorite article of clothing. I loved how it felt grand, worn, pre-loved. To this day, I never feel guilty about spending money on vintage clothes. I feel I deserve to have certain old things I’ll never be given by my mom.

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