Yesterday I finally returned to dealing with my life.

I've been living in a present full of future, of love, of laughter, too much red wine, midnight swims in an ocean of phosphorous, all the while, the sphere of my recent past casting a shadow on my thoughts, creating circumstance where there may not have been.

I thought I could go a whole day, a whole week even, without really thinking about these things, without really feeling them. Even now, I can't really say what they are. It's not that I don't want to, It's just that maybe I'm afraid to. There is a difference. I could get lost in my writing, my job, the little quotidian missions to which I assign my greatest non-renewable resources. Maybe I thought I could exist here, safely, behind the diaphanous curtain of los angeles, with the rest of the world, the rest of my life, an opaque cloud of light and shadow just outside my peripheral vision.

Yesterday at two in the afternoon, I met a family of buyers at my father's condo in Orange County. I wasn't expecting an entire family and as I rounded the corner, running late and nervous, I saw them all standing there, out for a Sunday afternoon of househunting: the husband and wife, the mother, a sister and a brother, there was even a baby. The real estate agent beamed at me, fake tan, gleaming teeth, brushing away my apologies for being late.

Into the house we all went. I opened blinds and adjusted the thermostat and my skirt. I watched these strangers walk through rooms in which I've lived, in which my father has lived and died. Is that your mother? She's beautiful, one commented, looking at the pictures on the walls. That's a nice coffee table. Oooh, I love this patio.

And now it is today and as I write this, the family is writing up an offer. I KNOW NOTHING about the buying or selling of property. I cannot accept their offer, only because I don't know what I'm doing and I didn't mean to have someone come to see the place so soon. I need real estate advice. I need second opinions. I need courage and strength and patience and time.

After they left I got to work. I promised myself that I would do something, anything to begin cleaning out the apartment. I decided I could handle dealing with the guest room closet. It is basically my closet afterall, the guest room my room after all.

Shortly after my Aunt died and my father took over her condo, making it into his own home, I came for a visit. Back then four years ago or more, whenever I would fly out here from New York to visit him we would spend the first evening together sitting at the kitched table, eating dinner and drinking wine. Inevitably, the evening would end with my tears. On one such evening I told him that I felt so transient, my childhood homes having been lost forever, my life boxed into 450 square feet five floors above Avenue B.

A couple of months later when I came for another visit, my father urged me immediately to take my suitcase to the guest room. I walked down the hall and came to the door. There was a printed sign declaring it "Claire's Room." He had bought a new bed, new sheets and comforter. There were flowers and pictures and on the wall a plastic bluebird that had been on the wall in my room as a child.

So that was my goal yesterday, to begin dismantling this room. The closet was stuffed full of duffel bags and boxes of clothes. The bags containing clothes that were too old and too many for my old New York apartment, the boxes full of clothes belonging to my mother, clothes I will never wear but cannot get rid of. I ran my fingers across the hangers and garmet bags, pulling down zippers that would reveal my father's military uniform, his tuxedo, my mother's wedding dress.

Liz had arrived at this point and sat on the floor as I pulled my mother's dress from it's casing. I pulled off my sweater and slid down my skirt, stepping into the satiny white. I had never tried on my mother's wedding dress. It fit perfectly, 1975 Oscar de la Renta. I stood in front of the mirror, in front of a girl I have known since I was three, in front of my own 25-year old reflection.

I don't want to get married for a long long time, maybe never. But since my father's death I have felt more of an urgency to one day have my own family, to just have a family again, even if I have to create it myself, to have a mother in my life again, even if it is me.
10:43:33 AM     comment []