HAUNTINGS: A Memory Only

By Virginia Lee Wood

Today, I am disappearing. When I look out of the window, the low buildings below are gray and there is a dusky light. I go out like vapor.

            Yesterday, a man came to the apartment and looked at the liquid on the floor. There she is, with her fingernails and her musky hair. Her body. He breathed through his mask and said, “I can clean the apartment but you’ll have to find someone else to sell it.”

            Today, outside, it is not like winter at all. A pigeon sits on the lip of the building next door, the bottoms of her feathers touched with green. I am not a ghost, just a memory, freed from the geology of the mind by a ceasing.

            When she left her body, she left some of herself with me. But memory does not belong without her.

            All the hands I held inside of her touched me as I went out. The hands of other memories I held. The image of her as a girl with the flu held by her mother, rocked to sleep, sweating. The time she vowed to love herself, and left the boyfriend who said she deserved to be hit. The time she fell on the sidewalk and walked home, both knees bleeding, and felt more alone than she ever had in her life. Touching me with their hands. Good-bye, friend. We were always shivering together, when she walked out into the world.

            Now I am alone. In my fabric, there are many things.

            A moment in her life, but also all of the moments she wrote into me, whenever she remembered. Rewriting and re-clothing me and whispering my name. “Mother. I miss you.” The time that Mom left her. That’s me. Red and painful. I grew sharper with time, and developed many hands, and legs, and organs. I wore many faces.

            When she bruised me, she felt it in her whole body. When she lost so many other memories, growing older and forgetful, I stayed, un-refracted.

            Disappearing.

            Out here, I see things we saw. A sign her mom would have thought funny. A subway stop where she cried quietly when she remembered it was her mother’s birthday. The mailbox where she learned the scholarship in her mother’s name had helped someone. The corner where she resisted a man on a bicycle trying to grab her purse. His velocity had pulled her into the drainage ditch. She lay there among the leaves thinking that maybe now, after everything, she might be as strong as her mother was.

            I lay there wet and wondering, inside her, holding the new hand of what it felt like to break her arm on the curb. Whenever it rained, and the bone ached, she thought of me.

            When she got sick, we all clutched each other inside, and she understood that she had come a long way, and that she was contained of much that was hurting, but also that brought her joy, and from then on, she tried like hell to remember that. Trying to grow wings upon us so that we would sit lighter, with colorful eyes between the many veins. We fluttered, and her heart beat crazily.

            The man who came to assess the apartment yesterday wore white and spoke loudly. We shook but could not raise her. Her touch, folding us, unfolding, rewriting, re-arranging, warming us like sulfur light was not there. Look, he is your boyfriends, your landlord, the girlfriend who was so afraid of men she could not go to the movies, your father’s hard hand that your mother could not take anymore, that dog you wanted to adopt even though he was snapping and slavering at you through the bars. Your anger. Losses. Tenderness. Fear. Doubt. Needfulness deeper than you could understand. We realized how loose in you we were then, crouching in a cold place together and singing to ears that didn’t know anymore.

I am not sharp. I have no curve, no lip.

I lick the air. I am bigger than the world. Her whisper, “I’m sorry I wasn’t there, Mom. I’m sorry that I was so angry you left me behind, that I could not be there for you.” It was the last name she gave me, when I was there always in the front of her mind, while she lay on the kitchen floor waiting for someone to come.

Go like vapor. Like hot breath. A world of dew in the air.

—

Virginia Lee Wood is a Korean American writer who holds a Doctorate in Creative Writing from the University of North Texas, as well as an MFA from Hollins University. Her work appears or is forthcoming in The Southern Review, Cutbank, Pleiades, LIT Magazine, The Minnesota Review, and elsewhere. She is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Austin College in Sherman, TX.