Mike x Key West
To think how I feel doesn’t matter, isn’t an issue I still suffer from. Before mom died, Maxie used to say, “I know you hate mom,” and if I feel that way, I should just leave. And I couldn’t — regardless of how I felt. I’d lost all power and I didn’t know it, yet. Though, that early morning at Union Station, giving hurried kisses to what would become an ex-fiancée and estranged babies, was a death that became myself. I escape the horror of life after exhumation. Speaking of which, do you know the work in burying a hatchet that you were left to hold, that wasn’t yours to begin?
It was 1984, and I stood in a trailer — a nice one, I remember — what I remember of it, with wooden-panel walls. It was tidy, maybe a double-wide; no outhouse, like the shack my father grew up in; though, we used chamber-pots because going to the outhouse felt like something from Children of the Corn. No, this was Pensacola, Florida. Home of humidity from Panama City coast; and professional cockfighters and chicken-chasing champions. I played with my Mickey Mouse ears, but don’t have a single picture from that time. I used to. Like I used to have baseball cards that I collected forever. I was Rickey Henderson anytime I stepped onto the diamond. We were driving to Key West and I’d just been in that trailer two years earlier. I thought about it as we drove the old Monte Carlo through Alligator Alley. I remember everything.
Like saving her as a 5-year-old; calling an aunt who came with another aunt, and their boyfriends. The apartment was small, even for a child. She doesn’t remember, my sister. And she couldn’t. And that’s good, I think.
Then, again, at 18. All of the things she always worried that I would be if she didn’t rip my head off for every little thing, she seemed to find in man. And when he came stalking her down the narrow walkway — her hobbled backpedal as fast as she could — the fear in her eyes and tone; and he, with knife in hand. We’ll both go today — but not her. She doesn’t remember, my sister. And that’s good, I think.
For someone who could never win approval in the way I used to yearn. Mister Sage made me write this letter to her, my mom, as a last-ditch assignment to help a kid failing his advanced English class, get an ‘A’. Only if I could mock Rilke.
The irony of her being born in Germany; or how I can’t stand hearing the German language, isn’t lost on me. But genuine is genius to those who haven’t lived deep enough to have real feelings to drown in. She thinks I hate her, my sister. That’s not right, I don’t think.
And their names were Steve and Marie, I think about it, the people we went to visit in Key West. All that I remember and this is the only semblance of peace that I can remember between them. Even the nights I slept between them until the last day that I saw them together — my mom and dad — I think about, maybe it was for her; even if we never hugged.
She says that I need therapy, my sister. That’s good, I think. Methinks, also, that this isn’t the first time someone questioned my relationship with God. Or with myself.
I escape the horror of life after exhumation.
And that’s good, I think — she’d like me to do that, my mother. And she can rest the way I always wished she could, in all of the days I watched her be in pain and wished it were my own. I couldn’t save you from this. And I’m sorry.
