She lied to you.
I was fourteen when
she first when into hospital. It’s funny how you can normalize what is
initially so shocking just with time. As if by sheer virtue of things going on
long enough, they develop outside the bounds of your own mind and become
something else entirely.
So of course she
visited the hospital regularly then after, she lost her hair and she got free
make up from support groups, which made her laugh because she never wore make
up. “
“A scarf or a wig or
does it matter?”
“Be a blonde for a
while” I said.
“They’re meant to have
more fun or something right?”
“Cut the crusts off
the bread, I read it in a health magazine in the waiting room, this smooth
rock, I got in the holistic shop, rub it every now and then its meant to have
healing properties”
“You can fuck off, if
a two euro rock and not eating bread crusts cured you, I wouldn’t be here in
the first place”
We both laughed, I was
so young, I looked at every option then and then one day I didn’t have to, one
day it was all over, one day we said the ‘C’ word out loud, we said it ‘Cured’.
I was fifteen.
“It won’t come back
will it?” I said.
“Not if I have
anything to do with it”
She lied to you.
I grew up. It seems
strange to say that. Past tense. Part of me still feels like I’ll always be a
teenager, like teenager is attached to me after all my teenage self made the
self who is writing this. My teenage self is as attached to myself as if it
were part of my physical make up, as if it were a tumour.
One thing we loved her
for was that ability to weave a story, everything could be anything and
anything could be everything in her mind, of course generally these stories was
to raise herself in higher esteem or to terrify us into doing what we were told
but there were other types of stories, the ones that thrilled and tingled at
what seemed like the very inside of our imaginations. Circuses under mushroom
heads and fairies following the ventricles of the leaves like maps. Now they
seemed marred, blemished. They were lies too.
She lied to you.
She had to keep going
to hospital regularly of course like I said so regularly it was normalized so
one day when she came back she looked a little more worn, a little more tired
than usual but she smiled a weak smile and made a joke that she didn’t want to
make dinner so much that night, she would rather eat my brother’s food, we
laughed. I was twenty-one, I had just graduated, the next day I booked my
tickets, globe trotting for a year, working in between, my dream in life, at my
fingertips on my keyboard, I smiled to myself.
That night she came
into my room like I was child to say goodnight except she said something else.
“You should do what
your able to, what you want when you can”
“Are you alright ma?”
“Bitta food poisoning
due to your brothers shit but nothing a good rest won’t cure”
We laughed.
An hour to go until
the plane leaves. Bags packed, I sit alone with the nervous reminders of my
mother at security echoing in my head. Did I have this, did I have that? It was
her nerves that left me sitting in the airport with an hour to spare and
nothing to do. I wondered about waiting, the space between now and then. I
hated it, time emptied of occurrence. Empty time. I wondered if I could gather
up all the time spent waiting, spent without happening and just allocate it to
something else. If I could I would give that time to my ma. If I could do that,
I would be on that plane now, if I could do that, I would not be thinking about
time, I would not feel overcome with guilt, the guilt of leaving someone dying.
If I did that, she would live longer.
Eighteen months the
doctor had said.
“Are you alright ma?”
She lied to you.
