The Broken Book

My foot’s asleep. It’s tingling, poking like static on the T.V. screen. I shift and twist, and start to hit my pen on the edge of the paper, trying to will words into my hand, but I can’t. Part of me must have died with her. My mother.

She left me $20,000 and a small black book that I can’t bring myself to open. I feel I should be grateful for those things, that she saved that money for me, but it is hard to feel grateful for anything after a death. At first I decided to write more, to feel it all, losing myself in words that used to drift from my fingertips, to publish another book, so people could heal themselves with my words. I couldn’t, no matter how I tried.

Friends came. They left books and food and candles. Some cleaned my house while I sat in my velvet chair by the small fireplace with the cracked brick on the side. Still, after all this love, it made me feel betrayed. Angry. Pitied. Betrayed by my own brokenness. I should be grateful. I should. I said so to them, but I couldn’t, for the life of me, feel so. Now, here I am, watching the fire from the candle dance with the small breaths from my mouth. I blow too hard, and the flame disappears, the bitter smells burning my nose. I get up calmly like a woman possessed, my joints creaking with the muscles that have been left neglected and go to the kitchen for the lighter. There lies the book. Her book. My eye locks onto the one rough fray in the soft leather cover. It has my attention now. Something cracks in me, making me, despite it all, want to open the book, to know what it contains. She’s been gone long enough.

I sit in the nearest chair, which ends up being a small, uncomfortable kitchen stool and open it. The Broken Book, it says in my mother’s swirling cursive. A knot in my chest forms at the sight of it, but somehow, all I want is to see more. I flip the page to the first entry.

How can I forgive myself? For not crying yet? The trees seem to cry, their leaves falling with every tear, the sky cries every drop, the wind moans and groans and shrieks for him. There must be a freedom in that, some twisted freedom, in expressing emotions exactly how you want to. I long for that, to scream and go feral.

Under that is a harsh line and a quote by Margret Atwood. I flip through the pages, careful not to let my eye catch a word so I can read it how it is written. After every section is a line, the sections and quotes never longer than a page, all fragments of thoughts.

Some days I lose myself in the candle flames, unable to blow straight up, dancing from side to side in any direction, every direction, unable to focus. Other days I feel like an iron bar, unable to move, unable to be pried from this ground, so I sit here, lost in one task. Forgotten and alone. Ravenous.

Every once in a while, above the sections, there are dates, all right after my father died. I think back to what I heard whispered around the corners. Words like, ‘Isn’t it sad,’ and, ‘I don’t think I could ever do that to my child.’ I was a baby and was sent to live with my grandparents because my mom didn’t trust herself to take care of me. I understand that now, the loneliness that tears at your arms, at your hair, at your veins, makes you drift, gone again and again, like the wick of a candle. People never truly understand grief until it happens to them. I feel closer to her now through that, though separated by time. We lost people, and for the first time I am grateful for that, that I could feel close again, like a ghost of her braiding my hair. I read on, thoughts not my own drifting in my mind.

It feels unfair that spaces and objects do not move to match you. His ghost sits at that table with me, his forgotten water glass still there, long after him. There are still beard trimmings stuck to the sink. I should clean soon.

I read on, lost in her words, in her own world of loss. When she was falling she turned to words like a ballast. My cheeks grow hot with the anger that words left me at the same time.

She needs me, I know that. Marguerite, Marguerite, Marguerite. I’m going to repeat her name until it sticks in my mind, my own baby girl. She shall be my smoke path out of this darkness.

I let out a sob, and I let it continue on. The new knot in my chest grows, but I find I don’t mind it so much anymore. She let me save her, all those years ago, and now she’s saving me. I stand up, shaky, aching all over. I look over at the book I left sitting on the counter. I’m most of the way through it. I look around at this small house that was ours with blurry eyes. I open the curtains, the same way she did, twisting them into a knot instead of bunching them at the sides, then I light all her candles, keeping the ceiling lights off. The room fills with a warm glow of the sunset outside, and I feel myself drifting around, like a ghost in the ghost world that has become a haven. When my eyes become clear, I blow all the candles out again, and therefore my pain with them. I light a fire in the fireplace, and retrieve the book.

I sit down in her chair, not mine. It is a stiff floral pattern, fraying where the fabric bends, the wooden legs have dents and cracks from stubbed toes and natural wear. I try to imagine myself writing these words in this book. We see the word so similarly, and so differently at the same time. There is a comfort in that, somewhere.

Am I healing? Is that a good thing? I don’t want to forget, if that is what healing is.

I only have a few pages left of her book, and I already want to turn back time, to the first page, just to read everything again and again. Somehow I know that she would want me to finish it, to linger in the pages, to become something more because of it. She left me this for a reason. I light the lamp next to me, now that the sun is completely hidden, leaving the fire to bear the darkness alone. I want to cry again.

I want her back, my daughter, my Marguerite. The bare trees seem to sway in agreement. Everything feels so soft, the sun making the floorboards golden. I want to open the curtains like he used to, with a knot in the middle, pulling it in. I feel like that now, like he took my ends and twisted a huge knot in my stomach, and all it wants is my family back. Am I ready? Will she still want me to be a mother?

“Yes, mom, I still want you,” I say out loud, like I am trying to pull her spirit back to me. I look over at the pale blue curtains I knotted. She did that for him, my father, and now I am doing it for her. I want my family back.

The next entry is a quote, the first one in awhile. I repeat it to myself over and over.

“I wait and ache. I think I have been healing.” -Sylvia Plath.

I let the flames in the fireplace die on their own. It must be after 10 p.m. but I don’t check the time. There is only one page left in her book, only one. I feel her slipping away. As I stand up I am careful to keep it in my sight, like if I look away too fast it will fall down a rabbit hole and she would be lost forever. After I can’t stand it anymore, I go and read the last page.

How do you know we have been healing? When we can smile again? When even after her tantrums and cries, I still feel better then I did, when I can almost see her laugh in the curls of the candle smoke? I think I have been healing, as Plath said. I think I have been healing. Spring is coming, and I think I have been healing. There is still so long to go. And I still see him everywhere. Everywhere.

There is one more entry. One more. It is dated years after the rest, ten days before she died. I try to postpone reading it. I make a cup of tea in her favorite cup, the light blue one, the same color of the curtains, with a chip in the handle. I make her favorite tea, blueberry ginger, even though I don’t like it. I want to taste what she did, do what she did in order to feel the things she did. Tiredness pricks at my eyes and I want to sleep. But I need to read the last thought, feel the last thing she gave to me. I cross back over to her chair.

It is still hard to let him go, after all these years, even though my hands are wrinkled and my hair speckled with gray, I still don’t want to let him go. I need you to know that, Marguerite. That loss, it is a wild beast, and it does not like to be tamed. It will be better, eventually, but first it will rip you apart. It will, I cannot bring myself to lie to you. But with that I will say, I love you, Marguerite, and I will stay with you as long as candle smoke follows the breeze.

Use the money I left you to travel, or renovate the house, as long as you still keep going.

I love you, I love you, I love you, Marguerite...

I clutch The Broken Book to my chest, something else tugging at my fingers as I walk back to my desk, the sleep banished from my eyes. I sit down and pick up my pen to write again, starting with, My Own Broken Book...