Stage Left

The string was cut We both had holes in our hearts. I kept mine open, she tried to mend hers. Maybe her attempt at healing was easier because she could remember a time when she was whole, a concept I never had a reference for. I carried her pictures with me both in my hands and also in my heart. I cried over them and smiled some days too. All the while, unknown to me, my mother wasn't somewhere missing me. My photos were hidden in a book on a shelf collecting dust while my mother lived her life with her heart receiving permafrost in the freezer. I imagined that she was just on the other side of the wall waiting for it to come down so we could be together just like the people where I was born. I was one when I walked amongst the rubble of the Iron Curtain. Oh what a blessing for an adopted daughter to have heard Ragens cry To Mr. Gorbachev. What I couldn't have known or expected, shouldn't have even once considered: She imagined me dead. To her, I no longer existed. The wall was her security. When the wall finally came down, I saw first the place that was supposed to be mine. Unlike the place in my heart that I reserved for her there were no flowers around a chair. Nothing to suggest that she had kept an open spot. For almost a decade, a stood in front of the chair I had decorated and maintained for her in an attempt to block her view of what was so obviously an unrequited love. Was it her or myself I thought I was protecting by obscuring the truth? When my knees stated to buckle under the weight of disappointment, shock too over. Denial eventually turned to rage followed by the deepest greif. As I convulsed in pain instead of running to tend to the wounds she inflicted, she took her cue and exited stage left.