Revlon Purple and loaded. I don’t smoke unless it’s the week of Christmas and I realize how ever many years ago today I arrived on my Mother’s doorstep for the last time. I don’t smoke unless it’s the week of Christmas and driving down the freeway at dawn I take in it will be the first Christmas with just the kids and me they with no father,  me no sisters and brothers, parents, us no extended family. I don’t smoke unless it’s the week of Christmas and seeing the ocean stormily reminds me of my invitation to my mother to come out west, to breathe if for just a summer, to take back the possibility of all her hopes and dreams…I would get her here, prove my loyalty. I don’t smoke unless it’s the week of Christmas and instead of the daily kale, chard, parsley, lemon, ginger, carrot, sweet potato, beet juice I make fresh in a sunny California kitchen I instead prefer to imbibe in a perilous cycle of coffee and alcohol. I don’t smoke unless it’s the week of Christmas and my reflection shows by lines and sallow places the age this year has gifted me. I don’t smoke unless it’s the week of Christmas and I can’t think of my now grown younger siblings any older than 2, 4, 6 and 8 years old in black and white, sepia-tone…perfectly distant in the yard of a tall white house dressed keenly in Kennedy-esque flair. I don’t smoke unless it’s the week of Christmas and I can’t seem to get everything done or give all I am normally capable of. I don’t smoke unless it’s the week of Christmas and a seldom chill in the SoCal air takes me back to our first and last Christmas together as a family, one I drove across country for in a freezing soft-top jeep, one I stole away in the night from an abusive ex-husband who forbade the visit, one I now faintishly recall as bribery in an attempt to keep her alive just one more fortnight. I don’t smoke unless it’s the week of Christmas and it seems the only way to keep myself, glue myself together from moment to moment when all I want to do is cry and feel pity for myself, for my grandmother, for my mother, for her children, for my sister, for my children, for all of the hardships we endure in life and so well keep on going. We are so strong, right? Isn’t that what it is? We are strong and she was not, is that what we are to believe?

She smoked every day, not just the week of Christmas. She glued herself back together with every light, every coffee sip, every alcohol drip, every pencil drawing, paint slip across watercolor paper. She glued herself together in a vicious cycle of falling apart. I don’t smoke, unless it’s the week of Christmas+

December 2013 – Revlon Purple and Loaded