Happy New Year!
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour
Happy New Year!
Can’t sleep in a strange place...
So clear-edged, my sister-in-law — like Mom used to be, but paler (no fake tan, hair dyed blonde, not copper). Holly’s more colorful, more innocent, practical in her brain but not her heart. She can bring down mortgage lenders, and she can make little collages for party invitations, with dried flowers glued on and a different inspirational quote on each. She hand-calligraphed them, too. I think she’s half-insane. I would be if I tried to be that — well, I am anyway.
I ought to love her for how she’s put up with Mom. Instead I almost hate her, and she feels it. She’s hurt, angry — but so kind to me, and I try to be kind to her...
I don’t want to hate her. I want to be kind to her, to ease that pressure off her, so she could breathe...
Instead, I’m a lump, and she’s a glorious hostess, and I wish I were anywhere but here. Even the pillows have a scent of lavender.
Mom did hate Holly, even living with her those last few years. At least Holly couldn’t tell, with Mom’s memory so bad.
I do hate Mom. It’s a reflex. Sometimes I try not to. Sometimes I...don’t try. Sometimes I love her too — I think. I hope. I feel the imprint of her mind on my mind, painful but with pleasure in the serrated edges of her humor. My brother Dave loves her, better than I ever could, and I love her better by watching him.
Dave cried when he called to tell me Mom had stopped recognizing him. I didn’t know what to tell him — she’d forgotten me a year before, and I was mostly relieved.
He’s out of work again. Idiot. No, ADHD. He can’t stand repetition or authority. He loves, though. He loves everyone better than I do, in that joking, nervous, gentle way, strangely gentle for someone who’d punch you out if you said the wrong thing at a bar.
Mom's always been on the edge of my mind. And now...she’s not. I’m free. To do what I don’t know — to write Evernost, mostly. She can’t laugh at it now. She never did before, because I never told her, but she would have, and that would have killed it dead. Just knowing she would made it thin and weak and sick.
A person’s worth more than a book, a trillion times. That’s almost the point of my book. I can feel the vastness of her, stupid and spiteful and jaunty and mocking, rough and steadfast and dutiful and unpretentious, loving Dave and laughing at him, trying to care about me — but she hated me, and never admitted it, and I always knew it, though sometimes I doubted.
Already, I feel Evernost growing in me, strong and free at last, and instead of Mom I’ll have it, and though I pray to any God that does or doesn’t exist that I’d do anything to save her — if I could — but I can’t. And terrifyingly much of me is glad for the substitution.
I read once that preferring the pictures in your head to the real is damnation.
Imagine it, if I took Holly to Evernost — and Mom. Showed them something really worth seeing. That would save both of them if anything could. I can fantasize about it, vengefully. Generously. A generous vengeance of terrible beauty.
Evernost...