Sometimes, when her darkness was distant or hovered weightless like a halo around her head, she’d stir from the winter quilts, every cell of her body starving not for food, but for dance. I’d know it was time, whether I was ten or thirty-five, because she’d reach for my hand like a ghost grasping air. As our fingers brushed, she’d sprout wings, light filling her limbs, and we’d spin and sway, lunge and lilt, flying from her bedroom, through the front door, on to the rooftop, over the city, so high the buildings, streets, and rivers merged into a landscape of ruins. Though her lips no longer formed words, she would point to the firmament and gasp. “Look, my girl. Look. We’ve become stars!”
And for that moment, mortality became but a borrowed notion, a glorious defiance of certainty, of gravity itself.
But by afternoon, maybe a little later, despair would begin to flicker, like a damaged lamp. Just a twitch at first. Her head would sag. Her feet stumble. Then a headlong plunge. Suddenly our dance looked foolish in the hesitant light. Mama’s body, shadow-bruised, wings folded inward in apology. I could feel her heart tremble almost shyly in her chest until it found a pulse. For me, not much left but weariness.
And just like that, as her night awakened, I nested her in bed. With practicality kind, like one tending the dead, I unlaced her shoes and stroked her chin and patted her head. In sing-song tune, I’d say ’It’s okay. Okay. We’ll dance. We’ll dance another day.’
Once again, I transform into an orphan, for a while at least. I boil the water for tea in the usual way. And begin to erect a past from estimated memory, as good as any I suppose, earnest as an architect of time.
Author's Note:
My self-care takes place each day in this simple chair. No matter how I feel, it supports me in such a way that sets me free to enter the worlds of others. To share in their loss, their trauma, their loneliness. To sometimes sit with them in the reverberant silence of understanding. To explore with them as they brave the acute discomfort of changing long- practiced habits and beliefs. To listen to their unique stories over and over until we both know them upside down and inside out. Their gift of connection always astonishes and restores me.
Amy Miller is a psychotherapist in rural Connecticut. Her poetry and prose explore trauma and loss in the process of healing. She won the Elizabeth Janeway Writing Prize and her recent work can be found in Longleaf Review and Identity Theory. X (Twitter) @AkmillerCt
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