Dear friend,
I still remember you with your hair chopped off, watching the alligator eat all those rabbits. How you squealed and covered your eyes like a little kid. How delightful you were. You are. You’re becoming.
Ross Gay tells me that the word “delight” can mean “of light” and “without light,” simultaneously. Yes, the lines on your face have never been so dark as they are today. And, yes, there is a lightness about you that didn’t exist some years before.
This glow was not there when you washed the dried blood from behind your daughter’s ears, just eight years prior. When your heavy hair hung past your shoulders and the New England air clung to your skin.
Now it’s just you and your van, and your daughter isn’t your daughter anymore. Now, you’re just two women who know each other; and you, both of you, are free.
Today, my Instagram is littered with sponsored ads for pregnancy tests. And when I picture myself next to my mother, the two of us in line at the grocery store, I play the mom. And the kid, who is me, who wants green apples and pudding, is just some baby I didn’t have.
They say that humans are attracted to sparkly things because it’s in our DNA to worship fresh water. Light, reflecting off crystal clear ponds. This glimmer is what keeps us alive.
We both know that I’d roll around in a silo of reflective plastic just to be looked at. Tear ducts caulked with glitter. Throbbing temples crowned with the biggest rocks Claire’s has got. But, one day, I, like you, will float in fresh water alone. Belly up, like any old fish.
No one wants to look at an old woman. And no one wants (to get) her pregnant.
You, old and tired and shitting into that bucket in the back of your van: I thought that this was the first time I had seen you not be a mother. But I was wrong.
No matter how much time passes, you will always be that mother that you were for a few hours all those years ago. You can’t leave that behind. You must carry that motherhood with you across state lines.
Even as you float on your back in the stream. As the clouds roll pink across the sky. As rocks crumble between your fingers.
Ross says this “is a kind of grownness.” To worship the sunlight, the shadows, the trembling trees. To “hear the train going by and feel no panic or despair, feel no sense of condemnation or doom.” To “simply observe the signs — light and song — for what they are.”
I think this is why delight has come to you now. There are versions of you that you carry into each new year. The haggard mom and the lip-glossed teen and the child in the checkout line. All layered on top of each other, wanting — no, asking — to be delighted.
Maybe this is what Ross meant when he said, “knowing what I have felt before, and might feel again, I feel a sense of relief, which is cousin to, or rather, water to, delight.”
