"I Would Die for You" -- Garbage

Once Mom, Amy and I had the best laugh of our lives. Or so I think...it's all just perception, I suppose. Anyway,  here I was, this naive young girl, reading aloud to them, and they were just rolling with laughter. I had no idea what the book was even talking about. There were tears streaming down their faces, and they just laughed so hard at every sentence that I read! Amazing that I had this power to induce such laughter! Alas, it is all in the book. The author kept saying, in the text, that he was impotent. But I did not fully understand this concept. As it was explained to me, by Mom and Amy, that it meant that you were no longer able to do something that you could once do. So they laughed at me reading this book with my best poker face. It was hard not to laugh, but the more I read, the more they laughed. It was fun. Mom was fun.  


I remember taking a walk with Mom, drinking peppermint schnapps and rum and cokes, weaving our way down the road. We strolled down the moonlit road with my favorite people in the world at my side, the chirping crickets pausing their songs as we went along, forming a hollow tunnel through the night noise which we filled with the laughter and jostling conversations of our own. 


Is it true? Was everything so perfect? I once had a Mother. It was cool because she taught me everything that I know. But, then again, I haven't finished learning.

We once threw a prom party at our house, and in the morning while Mom cooked everyone pancakes, the phone rang. It was ____'s Mom. She wanted to know if her son was there. He was a tall brown-headed boy with glasses. Mom went to the nearest boy matching that description and shook him roughly, telling him, "Wake up, your Mom is on the phone." 


In Mom's recollection, which was so amusing to hear, the boy just looked puzzled. He looked at her, looked at the phone, laid it down and went back to sleep. Or tried to anyway. Mom kept insisting that he talk to his Mother. 


Days later my sister and I were sitting at our friend's house and he tells us this story. Of course, being his friends, we knew that his Mother was dead. We were shocked, but thought that it was hilarious. He proceeded to tell us, in vivid comical detail, that our Mother had, unknowingly, insisted that he talk to his dead Mother on the phone, and that he kept refusing most politely until, finally she understood that this was not the son sought by the caller. At hearing this tale, we all shook with laughter until we cried, even he, who was trying to get a kick out of his dead Mother. 


But that was Mom, forever putting her foot in her mouth (that trait which she so graciously bestowed on me), and trying to have a laugh about it instead of fretting. Losing your Mother, or any parent, for that matter, changes you indelibly. You still see the way you saw before she died, you hear the way you did then, but there's this hole--somewhere you can never really identify-most of the time it's possible to ignore it, but it is lurking there, this empty feeling.

The emptiness, it is the space in my dreams, that swallows the joys of my life like a black hole. The black hole takes me through a wormhole, Darkoesque where I end in a place where my Mother exists. I know it cannot be, but I still dream. And when I dream, even if I cannot remember every little detail, I live in this place where life is different. Sometimes I can see her, sometimes I think that I can hear her speaking during the scenes of the dream. But it is forever fleeting, this contact. She's there somewhere beyond the body and I just cannot reach her.

In my dreams, different doesn't always mean good...