Yearly letter-5

Hi Mom,

You know it's been five years now. Five years have passed, and I still don't have very many tears, I think it's because I lost so many when I lost you.

My tears never fill up like they used to. Remember how I used to cry all the fucking time? I can't really cry anymore. 

But it will sneak up on me once in a while, in a gesture or a smile. In something outstandingly beautiful in nature, or dancers' grace. I remember all those hours you spent at the studio before I could drive, the time you added all the little flowers to my collar in the corps de ballet, even though the whole point is to be the same. Thank you for that. For the flowers. When I did my little piece in the back of the corps, they whispered to me "you're beautiful"; of course that was you, wasn't it?

Spring's here now, even though it's supposed to snow on Monday. Every year I wait for Spring for you. There's that chance to feel reborn, though it's bitter, ridden with the cycle of time. Time doesn't give a rat's ass for my whinging, and so it passes, so I seem to get farther and farther away from your memory. I used to be able to draw your face with my mind's eye. That's fading now. That's why I wish I saw more of you in my face. 

Sometimes I look in the mirror, and I don't really know my own face. Although

This year on the Ides, something got made. The part of the making I did, I dedicate to Claude.

Its pictures.....

but it's also me   

of some sad boy

And that makes it also you.
And also Dad.
And everything I've felt and known.
And how I feel about not knowing.
It's all very strange and beautiful, this living. I'm not quite sure if I'm doing it right, but I feel like I'm going somewhere.



Dave and I are getting hand-fasted in May. That's a fancy way of saying "hippie married". You'll like it.





                                 I miss you.

                                       Love always,

                                                  Cat 


PS-(All the photos here were taken by Marc Schreiner, in Brooklyn NY) 

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Ornaments

There is nothing wrong with being an ornament.

I do not always need to be important, in fact 

I relish sometimes that I am a take it or leave it proposition.

You might take my hand and carouse with me for the instant. We run through the woods, or smoke cigars on a bridge, we finger paint with tempera, or watch a seisun, we could drink coffee late at night.

And that 

Is all you need do. You don't even have to think about or consider it afterwards

Just enjoy our space in the moment.

There's a certain beauty in the unimportant

I cherish being without gravitas

The older I get it seems the more the anchor weighs

But oh how I love the ill planned adventure

I'm learning again how not to plan

And how to let the pieces fall

And smile through it cause

There's so much beauty in not knowing what comes next

When it's not in your hands, since, really, is it ever?

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Pierrot

I woke up and found myself in March again.

Again, scratching my head, with the wringing of my hands over the Ides. I slip gently, gently into the bath of fond remembrance, lukewarm now as time passes.

I feel the hollow, it spreads from my throat down to my heart and it will congeal there until the Ides. My jaw tight with the filaments of shock that reverberate, reminding me of my sister hushing me in a sterile, sterile room. My mother looking first blue, then small and pale, like Pierrot.

When I was younger, I flipped, fascinated, through my mother's photo albums. Looking at a person who was but also was not her. I stumbled across that young woman covered in white face and a black skull cap.She's doing her best Sarah Berhardt, her eyes rolling wistfully to the ceiling somewhere in the 70s. 

And I remember how her eyes lit as she told me of Pierrot and how she loved him. 

I loved those photos, my mother's face drawn but full of life.

And here I am, looking in the mirror. I think about the Ides and I think about the sad clowns in the world, and I cannot help but smile. I laugh even.  

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