26 January 2018

I want to write an honest sentence. When my former colleague asks if my sentiment comes from Hemingway—he of the “one true sentence”--I note the difference between “true” and “honest.” A true sentence sings; an honest one interrupts. The judge, on giving the child abuser a life sentence, pronounced it “death.” A life sentence comes without an end stop, but death is all period. He thinks of retirement as prelude to dying, of open time as paralysis, but it's merely a more private form of scattering. I have my mother's ashes beneath my desk, needing to get to my father's shelf in Arlington. It's a peculiar form of procrastination, this holding onto a box in which a bag in which the gray dust of a mother's substance sits. I am exiled not from her womb but from her ash. When the priest uttered the lines “ashes to ashes” in Charlottesville, Virginia in the mid-80s, I began to weep. I thought of Holly, beside me, but couldn't stop. To put my mother's ashes on a shelf is not to scatter them but to suggest they are in a book closed behind a metal door, a possible text. The color of shredded newspaper, her bones. My friend and I talk trauma at the coffee shop. I remember my mother, at five, declaring no one would ever hurt her again. It worked, for a while, that speech act. She acted in college, got an MA in Theater. She'd meant it then, she said, to my request for an apology. As if honesty merits loyalty even after term limits expire. Her last years were a scattering before ashes. There was anger and there was sweetness, but none of it seemed true. They were the flashes of light on the screen, before final chords barge in. Cords, clouds, the smudge of blue gray green above the Koolau in Manoa. We turn our backs to them, head to the car to drive back home.

--26 January 2018