We were young when we met. Much younger than now. We hadn't done anything. We'd only been hurt. The first night we kissed we sat in his car, parked outside the cafe where we both worked. It was late and it was summer. Cicadas hummed in the trees outside the windows. Inside the lights on the dashboard glowed and Marvin Gaye sounded distant in the speakers. I sat in the passenger seat, unable to look at him. I kicked off my shoes and leaning over, a bobby-pin fell out of my hair. I peeled off my tights, the first thing I always did when I finished a shift. He lit a cigarette and the hot breeze felt cool against my bare calves.

That was a long time ago. It was fights and decisions and compromises and moves and kisses ago. It was so long ago that when I look back on that night, sitting in his car I can only see him as I see him now, just as he is now on the couch watching a program about the world's greatest structures. When I remember myself that night too I can only see everything I've ever said to him, every kind of smile I've ever given him, every time I've ever hurt him. It's as if we always were, as if there was never one night, one summer, one city, five years ago where we were just two people who didn't know each other, who had never touched but wanted to.

A few weeks later I remembered a story about raccoons that I had read in a book. For some reason I decided to recount this story in a letter to him. It was less of a story and more of a fable but originally written as advice. The story was about the best way to catch a raccoon and I think, at the time, I thought I could impress him with this strange information.

Apparently raccoons are desperately attracted to shiny objects and will go to great lengths to retain them. So the best way to catch one is to dig a long, narrow hole into the ground and to place something glittery in the bottom, like an earring or a bottle cap. Then you drive nails into the opening of the hole, the points facing inwards and down but almost touching. When the raccoon reaches into the hole to get the shiny object he will close his fist around it, making it impossible to pull it back through the narrow opening of nails without letting go. According to this story that I read years ago, the raccoon will refuse to release the shiny thing and will sit, one paw in the earth, trapped by sheer desire.
10:53:40 PM    

February 2001

I wanted to go home. I did not want to stay for the service. I made that decision on a Monday. That Monday was Julie's 23rd birthday. It was also the first day that she did not wake up. I had arrived in Atlanta on the Friday before that Monday that was Julie's birthday and the day that I decided that I wanted to go home. I had talked to Terry, Julie's stepmother on Thursday. She said that Julie only had a few days and if I wanted to spend any last time with her I should come the next day. The next day was Friday. Mike and I both went.

We left our home, our little apartment on 5th Street where we have both lived for almost three years and got on a plane to Atlanta. Atlanta is where we both used to live, where we both grew up, where we both had old homes. The only difference between us both having old homes is that he is able to visit his. I am not. There are strangers living in my old home now. My mother is not there. My father is not there. The dogs we used to have and the guinea pig and the parrot and the fish and the furniture and paintings and clothes and rugs and beds are not there any more.

The old home of mine that I am referring to is really the only place I will ever think of as home. I do love where I live now. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, confused, and I look out into the little kitchen with our pots and pans and coffee cups waiting for us and I feel comforted. But sometimes when I am sad and I am in bed crying, I whisper, "I want to go home." The home I am referring to is the one where strangers now live. Other times when I cannot fall asleep I lay on my back in the bed and in my mind I walk through that old home.

That home is the last place where my life was ever normal. At night in my mind I pull quickly up the steep, cracked driveway, past the magnolia tree and the front of the two-story house with old southern double stairs. It is well into spring in my mind and at the top of the driveway beside the carport, wisteria hangs heavily in the heat, the smell as thick as the air. I slam the door of my little red Saab and run up the back steps. There is a white wooden gate and before I open it I lean my head over and make faces at our dogs, two Welsh Corgis, who are waiting for me. I go through the gate and turn the knob of the heat-swollen kitchen door while simultaneously jabbing it with my knee to open it.

I am seventeen when I walk through that door. My hair hangs long past my shoulders, with a crimson tint. I am wearing a white v-neck men's t-shirt and jeans with heavy black shoes. I walk through that door and my mother is sitting at her desk, her back to me. "Hi Honey," she says without turning around just yet. There is a large birdcage to my left and, Norman, it's inhabitant, squawks gaily at my entrance. I walk past my mother and wave to my father who is in the dining room, sitting at the huge marble table, bills and papers spread out around him. I walk through the kitchen with it's green marble countertops and hanging pot rack, through the living room and run down the stairs into the basement.

My room is in the basement, far back on the left side of the house. The house is built on a hill so the basement is on the bottom of the hill and the second story of the house looks out on the top of the hill. The basement smells wet because my mom has been down there making paper from homemade pulp and pressed flowers. I throw my bag on the floor and check my answering machine. My room is cramped by furniture that was bought for a larger room, in a house that we lived in for a while in Florida, but I still love it. I have a queen size, four poster bed and a large armoire filled with sweaters and albums and trinkets. There is a little cream colored couch that is currently covered up with clothes and there are glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling. Sometimes when my mom has had too much to drink she makes us both come downstairs and lay in the dark on my bed staring at the stars and talking.

She wants to hear about my life, she says, her voice slightly slurred. As I begin to tell her little things about my boyfriend or my friends she interrupts me to tell me stories about when she was young. She tells me how confused she always was, how her mother never loved her the way she needed her to. She says that she wasn't as smart as I am now. When she says this, she leans up on one elbow and looks at me. She reaches over and brushes the hair away from my face, still staring at me. I don't look at her. Finally she sighs and says, "Oh honey, you have so much to learn, so much to do. Trust me." She always wanted me to trust her and most of the time I did.

At night, now, in my mind I do not pass through the kitchen and run downstairs. I stop after coming through that door and I take in the sight of my mother, her back bent away from the desk, her white-blond hair at her shoulders, the hairs on her arm. This is the point, in bed, where I open my eyes wide in the dark and then squeeze them shut again to release the tears. This walking through of my old house does not help me to fall asleep, though sometimes I tell myself it will.

After she died, my father and I had to walk through that door. We walked through it and into the kitchen. Norman was not in his cage. The dogs had not been at the gate. My mother was not at her desk. Her address book was there. Her purse was even there. In the kitchen her pots and pans hung quietly in the gloom and in the living room her knitting lay untouched. We wandered through the rooms, as though looking for her, but really taking inventory of what we had left: her toothbrush and contact lenses. Her reading glasses and nightgowns. For days and weeks mail still came for her. Sometimes people even called for her, not knowing that she was dead. My heart leapt whenever someone asked for her. Maybe they knew something I didn't, not the other way around.

In October, when it grew colder, we packed up the house. I stood in tears, a nightgown in each hand staring out her bedroom window. I picked over her perfumes and cosmetics, came across a little jewelry box in which she had been collecting the hair that fell out from chemo. I chose a few of the multitudes of stuffed animals she had given me over the years, the stuffed Easter Bunnies she had given me every year. We gave away some of her art work to friends and relatives. We had a garage sale and I watched in the shadows as strangers mused over my mother's things. We gave Norman back to the woman my mother had bought him from. We sold the fish and the fish tank at the yard sale. We found homes for the dogs and the guinea pig. We packed the rest up and we left, my father and I. We have new homes now, homes we like, homes that comfort us in the night.
10:49:25 PM    

October 3, 1999

I never saw you dead. I saw you dying for a long time. I saw your hair become thin and less. I saw your skin hang limply against your bones, no fat left to support. I saw the staples the doctors put in your stomach to keep it closed after they had opened it. I saw the eventual scars the staples left. I saw the muscles in your cheeks begin to stop working so that your mouth opened and closed when you weren't paying attention.

I hate these things. I hate writing about them even though I sometimes feel I must. These things don't have anything to do with who you were. These failings of your body, the attempts to fix your body only have to do with what you eventually weren't. I spent the last few months of your life watching you in this manner. I watched the nurses bathe you, brush your hair. I watched your sister rub your limp feet. She smoothed lotion into the dry skin on your legs and even put chapstick on your lips.

I sat back terrified. Terrified to touch you. I was afraid that by touching you, caring for you I would be acknowledging that you were my mother. That this limp, decaying and scared person was my mother. I know this must have hurt you. I often wonder what you thought about in those last months. I sit here in front of my stupid computer almost two and a half years later crying because I know I must have hurt you. That would have made you happy, to have a daughter that cared so much about you. One that cared so much as to wipe the crust away from your mouth before applying a soothing lip balm. I could have done that for you. Physically I could have done that. Then, during those days I spent trapped in that cancer ward I could not have done that. Doing something like that would not only have shattered but cast into nonexistence a world I was trying so hard to keep alive. A world where mothers didn't die.

Oh, and of course now. Of course now I wish more than anything I will ever wish for in my life that I could have those months back. I would crawl right into that hospital bed with you and put my arms around you. I would lay there beside your dying body and let you sleep, let you know that I am your daughter. This just seems to be how it is for most people. Always a looking back, always a regret when it comes to matters such as these. No one told me that your death was final, that I would not be able to say goodbye. No one told me that I would spend a lifetime looking back.

Actually I have to tell the truth. Someone did try to warn me. One night before you were really sick and when I was still in Vermont at college I went to see a student tutor about a paper I was having trouble with. He was busy and we made an appointment for later that evening. When I returned to my room there was an urgent message from my father. I deliberated whether or not to call him for a while. Every time I spoke to him there was bad news about you and the cancer. Finally I called him. You were definitely dying. He was taking you to a hospital in Washington, D.C. where there was a doctor conducting experimental surgery on "last hope" patients. We would now spend Thanksgiving in D.C.

I felt sick. But there was no one thing to feel. No one thing at all to do. For a while I sat on the bed just staring. After some time had passed I looked at the clock and noticed it was almost eleven, almost time for the appointment with the tutor. It was something to do. I gathered my papers and notebooks and trudged through the snow to the little building in which the tutor conducted his sessions. We sat down and he began to read my paper silently to himself. I knew who he was; a senior named Deni who was majoring in writing. That was all I knew. While he was reading I sat looking out the window at the snow and the dorms, the trees and parked cars. I kept thinking about my mother and suddenly I was crying.

I wanted to be crying. He looked up after a few minutes and narrowed his eyes thinking about the situation that had just arisen. He asked me what was wrong and I told him. My mother is dying of cancer. It has gotten very serious. She has had it for five years but now she is really sick. I have to spend Thanksgiving in D.C. at a hospital. My father says she is going to die. He looked at me and let me talk. I told him that I was afraid to be an eighteen-year-old girl without a mother. I told him that I didn't want to grow up without her. When I stopped he said that his father had committed suicide a year ago, that he understood. He just said it, not without emotion but as if he couldn't listen to me anymore unless I knew that he really understood everything I had just said.

After our relief to be sharing such burdens with strangers, after we had talked for a long time about death he suddenly said that the strangest thing about us finding ourselves in this situation together was the fact of the night that it happened to be. It was his father's birthday he said. Then he looked at his watch and said that actually it was now his birthday since it was past twelve. His birthday was the day after his father's. He began to cry. This boy who was almost a man, who was almost a stranger began to cry. He said that his father had lived in a different time zone and when it was eleven in one zone and twelve in another they would call each other and wish happy birthday. He continued to cry and through his tears told me that this was the first time he had cried for his father's death.

We spent the next hour discussing how I should use that last amount of time with my mother. What I should say to her, what I should ask her, what I should give to her before she was gone. When the night was over and I was alone going to sleep in my little dorm room cot I felt confident that I would be able to come to terms with my mother's death, that I would have enough time to say goodbye, unlike Deni. I was sure that my mother and I would be able to say all the things we would need to. I was sure it would be hard but I was willing to try and to succeed.

Looking back now, I don't think one can be warned about such a thing. No matter how wonderful and enlightening my night with Deni was there was nothing that could have prepared me for her death. For the thing that I did not know that night as I lay in my bed spinning out mind conversations with my mother was that I did not think that she would die.

Jamaica Kincaid writes:

What to make of it? Why can't everybody just get used to it? People are born and they just can't go on and on, and if they can't go on and on, then they must go, but it is so hard, so hard for the people left behind; it's so hard to see them go, as if it had never happened before, and so hard it could not happen to anyone else, no one but you can survive this kind of loss, seeing someone go, seeing them leave you behind; you don't want to go with them, you only don't want them to go.
10:36:23 PM    

October 23, 1999

When I was sixteen I collected my menstrual blood in a jar. It started after my first boyfriend and I had had not too safe sex. It started after that very first time a girl worries about her period. Every woman I know has worried, has gone to K-mart and bought that first pregnancy test to take at home in the afternoon from school. In my junior and senior years of highschool it seemed like every other week, at least four of us would gather at my friend Lucy's house, whose mother worked until late, and we would all wait anxiously outside the bathroom in Lucy's room to find out who was going to be the first to get pregnant for real. Turns out it was me but not then. Not then, in the comforting haven of Lucy's bedroom when I was sixteen.

But nonetheless, then was when I learned how important my period was to me, for reasons I could not explain then, but perhaps now. I was never one of those girls who were afraid of her period, deftly shoving a tampon inside at the first sight of red. I had waited for three long years in middleschool for my period, jealously watching my friends get bras and buy their first pads. I was a late bloomer and the only girl with a mother who was anticipating my first period as much as I was. She relished my changing body and oncoming femininity with comforting understanding. And of course the day I finally got it, she wasn't home. I had even run out of the supply of pads and tampons I kept in the bathroom cupboard because I had used them all up trying them out. So I got on my bike and rode the two miles to the convenience store with tissue wedged in my panties to proudly ask the pimple-ridden, teenaged boy behind the counter for a box of pads. My mother took me out to lunch when she got home, just the two of us and told me of the horrible contraptions they had to wear back in the day to stifle the blood.

After the first time I was late I realized how amazing that beautiful red blood could be, what it meant, and how life changing the presence or absence of it was. After that first time I was late, I smeared a glob of it into my journal and was taken by the sight of it's redness against the creamy white pages of my diary. The next month after first trying to squat over a jar on my bathroom floor I devised a system of spreading a wide plastic sheet with a slight dip in the middle over my toilet and I would sit for an hour or so with whatever I happened to be reading at the moment letting the blood slowly slide out of me. Later I would transfer it to the jar.

This was a tedious process and I never did collect that much blood but I was really infatuated with that jar. There was nothing I ever really planned on doing with it but it was enough to just look at it and know that inside the jar was something that was about me, about who I could be, and who I wanted to be. After a few months of collecting, I tired of the process and for a long while the jar got lost in the depths of my closet.

Still, there were so many more afternoons at Lucy's, so many more plastic test sticks proclaiming negativity. I collected those in my closet for a while too. And yes, just like every woman I know, after each pregnancy test I would swear to myself that this would never ever happen again and I would swear to remember the fear contained in those four short minutes waiting for the test to tell you how your life will be. But miraculously six months or a year later, there I would be again stuffing another negative pregnancy test into the box in the closet.

Things were no different when I was nineteen, when I met Mike. We were very in love and we weren't very careful. I'm almost even positive that I know what night it was when I got pregnant, not that I realized it then. I didn't realize I was pregnant until after I had moved to Vermont and Mike was still in Atlanta. I was late and went to K-mart and bought the token pregnancy test. I had told Mike about it and was even on the phone with him when I took it. I laughed a lot, told him about afternoons at Lucy's and how none of us had ever gotten pregnant. I peed on the little plastic stick, left it in the bathroom and sat in the bedroom talking to Mike and smoking a cigarette. After stubbing out the butt I went into the bathroom, picked up the stick and felt what it was like to have that fear continue past the usual four minutes.

I had an abortion at a little clinic thirty miles north of the town I lived in. I told my Dad. I told my advisor at school. I told my best friend, Julie. I thought about calling Lucy but didn't. I opted against painkillers. The nurse on the phone had said that the painkillers would dull the pain and make me really out of it, that I might not even remember the procedure. I wanted to remember the procedure. Having an abortion went along with the jar and the collection of test sticks, somehow even with my mother[base ']s recent death. The weekend I found out I was pregnant happened to be the one-year anniversary of her death. Having an abortion was not something that I wanted to lose in the back of the closet.

Mike flew up and held my hand. The abortion was the most humbling experience of my life. I removed my jeans and my underwear and lay down on the cot with a sweater and my socks still on. There was a nurse to dispose of the blood and tissue and the male doctor who painfully scraped at my uterine walls. I lay on the cot sweating and crying, Mike holding my hand, trying as hard as I could to imagine that it was my mother's hand in mine not Mike's. Afterwards was the worst. The doctor and the nurse left after having covered me with a plastic sheet. I curled into the fetal position and looked at Mike, realizing for the first time how horrible this was for him. My stomach cramped into a thousand kinks and I alternated between fear of vomiting or losing my bowels. Then fifteen minutes later it was all over. That was horrible too.

Ever since then I have been on the pill. I hate the pill. On the last Friday of every month my period comes at 11:30 in the morning unaccompanied by cramps or backaches. There is never a lot of blood, nothing to get excited about, to be awed by. Usually now, I just reach for the box of tampons and try later to remember what it is that makes me a woman.
10:17:13 PM