It came softly, first, with the timidity of a new student matriculating halfway through the year. Transmitted through the tight spirals of familiarity and trust bred by otherness. Infecting and propagating unfettered until awareness dawned too late, that, independence is a learned behavior. That because the skill-set and will necessary to think for oneself has long since fallen out of fashion we faced this catastrophe absent inoculation. And so it was that scholarship was overtaken by the social media perpetual motion machine. Which values only the sensational. Ushering in this new decade in our great age of enlightenment awash in epidemic ignorance. Contracted through eyes, and ears precisely tuned for the reception of information which changes continuously and cannot be investigated. Bolstered by the compulsory and universal acceptance of godheads speaking and writing fast enough to recraft the world in the image of their half truths and whole lies.

White Noise reigns from the pulpits of power granted the popular and we can no longer distinguish fact from fantasy. Because, questioning is anathema to the salvation promised the obedient. Because the threat of excommunication, of cancellation, hangs over the heads of those faithful lest they do or say or think anything outside the approved messaging. Conformity, even and especially in the pretense of individuality, has become our god and our country. And it came softly. Welcomed into our homes in the shortened news cycle, the lackadaisical relationship with accuracy, and the appellation to authority usurped from the worthy by the exciting. Ours will not be death by disease, stress, war, famine, or loneliness. Rather all those and more as functions of the greater pandemic, ignorance.

She pined for his warmth

and

Wore the dim reflection of his light

as

Badge and bondage of belonging

to

One who was always

just

Beyond her dawning

and

Outside the pull of her tides

which

Whispered love letters to shores

shaped

In the image of her wanting

until

She saw herself refracted on the waves

into

Thousands of undulating points of light

and

Was awed by the way darkness

complemented

Such prismatic brilliance

so

She took each unanswered I love you

each

Feeling of unworthiness

and

Reshaped them in her image

rejecting

The dim reflection of his unrequited light

for

The icy fires of her own song

that

She might decorate her midnight throne

with

Love letters, to herself

-EJoveJohnson

My giving hands hung, empty of the hope once delicately enshrined in fragile china. Which, now was scattered in fireworks of irreparable shards on the floor. I didn’t need to look at her to see the fat tears of anger. I didn’t need to watch as the wrinkles etched by time on the backs of her hands, smoothed, with the balling of her fists. I was already anxiety in motion picking up the pieces. Compelled as though the act of collecting them and holding them together again would fix the years of misunderstandings and abrupt endings. If I could just, put the pieces together properly....

“Do not touch them.” It was a statement which was both the beginning and the end of the conversation. A coded warning to evacuate the area immediately. I looked up, from the wreckage to her chin pointed skyward in exasperation. Immediately, I was five years old again, hiding under the wing chair in the music room. My knees bloodied from kneeling on the shards of now broken stemware I wasn’t supposed to be playing with to hide them. As I had then, now I stayed frozen, with fragments of glazed white dishware trimmed with delicate pink roses suspended between fingers and floor.

“I said, leave.” Still she wasn’t looking at me, her jaw clenched as tears drew angry art across her cheeks and began to stain her collar.

“I...” didn’t sound like the adult, the career person I’d grown into, because in these situations I never was. I would always be the child who came just shy of success. Who, executed things in such a way as to almost make her proud... but not quite. True to form, I now knelt stage center in the Pollock of good intentions and poor planning, protagonist in yet another instance of disappointment and failure added to the innumerable disappointments and failures already indexed alphabetically and by severity.

There’d be silence between us for a full day, which would then give way to the tolerance of physical presence. Eventually, the stalemate would break with an offhand comment - by her- on the minutia of daily life and things would return to normal. Years from now this moment would be recast to reflect the person she wishes she was, and, the person I’ve never been.

“No.” I have no idea where that word came from, much less the voice I used to say it. Her chin shifted, slightly downward. “Leave.” “I said, no.” Finally she met my line of sight. Tears had gone and her face was a confusion of round red shapes. Her lips curled inward, from the vitriol of the words they were forming.

“It was an accident, you know it was an accident, why are you doing this?” I stood now, raising to my full height at least two inches taller than her. Marvelling at how she who had loomed so large, could have become so small. The fury on her face flickered as I looked down to her. “Why, mom, why are you doing this?” I braced myself for the strike of her hand, but, it never came.

“I can’t help it.” Her voice was soft, light as a late summer breeze, like a thought that escaped without permission. The red in her cheeks deepened, but the angry lines between her brows and the hard set of her jaw softened, she looked every inch the little girl in the photos she treasured. For the first time in my life, vulnerability broke through her impenetrable defenses, and neither of us knew what to do about it. “It belonged to grandma, she loved that set, and now it’s ruined.” I closed the distance between us in a step and hugged her, tight, she cried. Not the fat angry tears of displaced rage, but, the tears of a frightened little girl faced with the reality of a life which had deviated from the one she’d almost wished into existence. A life which she was able to escape via objects to relive the rarified past, which, was becoming more real than the family surrounding her.

“I’m sorry”

She paused, the length of a breath, and without acknowledging my words immediately transitioned into the story of grandma’s china. How it had been stolen during a move, and that years later she’d found just the same pattern in an antique shop. How her perfect recall of detail allowed her to restore the lost china. Fluidly, she then launched into the hundred permutations of stories where this -now ruined- china was only just eclipsed by the starring co-leads of her desireability and promise.

“Mom”

“But then, when Monsignor came over to...”

“Mom.”

In an instant she was back in the reality of this shadowy winding hallway. One of many in the ramshackle victorian crumbling from neglected repairs which had become the physical embodiment of her palace of tangible memories. Bursting with objects and mementos of her life before, us, when her husband and children and home were perfect in the future of her imagination. Her hands fell to her sides and she stepped back from me then, crunching audibly on a piece of the charger shattered to oblivion at our feet.

“I know you didn’t mean it... but...”

She let the sentence trail off. For a long minute neither of us said anything. “You’re not really like me at all are you, except, in the ways we’re exactly the same.” I exhaled the fear that she’d slipped back behind her walls of treasured dreams, “that about sums it up I guess.” I laughed awkwardly, and we were suddenly two pre-schoolers on a playground meeting each other for the first time.

“I can replace the plate you know.....” She looked down at the floor. The thousands of tiny shards in white and pale pink and green shimmered softly in the late afternoon light. “It’s ok, you don’t have to, don’t spend your money on it I know this kind of stuff doesn’t matter to you.” “Mom, it matters to you, that’s enough.” She looked at me then, really looked at me. With my too short hair and too tight clothes, and my strange sidelong journey into adulthood chronicled on my skin. Which, is just the same and nothing like hers.

“Really?”

“Yea mom, really.”

She smiled then, as her universe of distant wishes began to realign, shoring up but not as tightly the hole in the wall of her dreams. “Yes that would be very nice dear, then we’ll have a complete set again.” “Sounds good, I’ve got a few ideas of where to look..... would you want to look together?” The question hung in the air, and she paused halfway into the butler’s pantry. “You’d want to do that with me...” The question stung, calling into sharp relief that she’d been entirely aware of my not so delicate waltz of placation and avoidance I’d perfected in the years since high school. “Yeah, I’d really like that actually.” It was the instinctual “correct” response, but also the honest one.

I couldn’t see her face then, but in the perfect past of my imagination I like to think she smiled. “Ok, maybe later? I want to get this cleaned up before shards get tracked all over the house.” “Want me to help?” “No it’s ok, I can do it.” Her voice was molasses thick with emotion she wasn’t comfortable acknowledging. “Ok mom, I’ll come back later and we’ll start searching ok?”

“Ok”

“Mom?”

“Yes?”

“I love you...”

I let the phrase sit in the pauses between heartbeats. Wanting a return, but not expecting one, not so soon anyway. After a few seconds I turned and started toward the door, choosing to focus on the positives of this encounter rather than the miles of repair left to go.

“I love you too.”

-E Jove Johnson