In the beginning, it will feel fresh. Her hands will feel like a freshly laundered sheet on top of yours. She will kiss you as if you were the last person she will ever see, and you will kiss back like she is the first girl you have ever seen. You will savor every sound she expels as if it were an ice cube on your skin in the Texas heat. She will listen intently, but talk less. When she does, her music will fill up every moment in space. She has sat in silence for too long.
She will cross continents with her conversations, but she will tip-toe around houses and homes. Her conversations skip her entire family and jump over her mother altogether. You will begin to speak about yours, forgetting how quickly the conversation becomes one-sided. It feels like a game of Jenga, as if you’re pulling pieces of the past to try and build the future.
Yet she does not stutter-step when asked about her family – it is a ballet which she has choreographed and practice many times. You wonder how often she performs this same piece. Her feet leap over cracks and spin around difficult questions. This dance has become her armor – always protecting her, always guarding her. It pains you to think how many times her heart has bled by practicing at the barre. How many times has she fallen in bereavement? Does she lace up her slippers with grief? Will you ever be able to see who she is behind the ballet?
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Between performances, she will let you backstage for a few minutes. You will get to walk around and watch and listen to her. She remembers a time when she was young and her mother confused Stephen Hawking with the creator of Hawkins Pressure Cookers. “Hawkings? What is this physics business? He made our pressure cooker!” She laughs and reaches for your hand. Don’t slight this action; her hand has moved mountains to reach yours. To you it will seem like a walk in the park; very casual, perhaps even routine, but to her, it feels likes she’s walking on glass. She is beginning to trust you.
You will try to say that how much you love your mother is how much you want to love her. She understands the your affection for her, but doesn’t at the same time. You see, her mother taught her how to give love abundantly, but wasn’t there to teach her how to accept the same. Don’t ask her why she can’t accept it; she’ll leave you alone before you realize she’s gone.
You don’t understand how strong she dances on stage but runs in the face of confrontation. She runs to the wings leaving you with nothing but a bad joke and angel dust. The closer you get to her, the faster she runs. You think that you may never catch up, that her mother gave her wings rather than feet. A girl who’s lost her mother flies whenever she can because she’s been chained down longer than she understands.
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It’s no surprise that confrontation and conflict makes her flee. For a girl who is brimming with opinions and ideas, she bites her tongue too often. Her silence isn’t strange. She listens more than she speaks, because she now knows that you have to listen to hear when someone you love says that they’re leaving – she has missed too many goodbyes to speak up. The woman who loved and cared for her before she was born left before she realized she didn’t say goodbye – before she realized she needed to say goodbye. That scares her to silence and makes her feel less worthy of her voice. It makes her feel like she doesn’t have the power to speak up, but only to watch those she loves leave.
It makes her feel like the only thing she is worth, is leaving.
She won’t let you backstage too easily. She does not want you to think of her as broken, sad, distant. She is not a charity case to be donated to. She is hurt, not broken. Quiet, rather than sad. She is a force of nature not to be reckoned with. She has strength brewing underneath the quiet of her voice.
If you love a girl who has lost her mother, love her with more than your heart. She’ll keep pushing it back to you and you won’t understand why. But she will always love you more than she thinks she deserves, so be patient and love her anyway.
