One of Us Must Maintain a Vivid Imagination

I did not feel exceedingly hopeful when I wrote this, first in my head, then as I transcribed it to paper, laboring over imagery and syntax. Nor when I sealed it in a hand-addressed envelope, as if I were dressing an orphan and shooing the helpless thing out the door for a long and lonely journey to a journal many states away, which is going against the grain in these modern times, the way you would tell me—break free from the norm, go get people’s attention.

Any enthusiasm I harbored began to wane days later when it was flagged by the postal service, perhaps because of the puffed-up SASE, and became part of an internal investigation. I refused to allow myself to wonder if it would reach its intended recipient.  

I did not feel much of anything, except pangs of confusion, when protestors began burning copies of it in the public square. Or later, when others began using what tattered shards remained as an epigraph for their own causes. How could such a thing have happened?

In a strange twist of fate, I felt it was unworthy of being added to the minutes of municipal zoning hearings, let alone an addendum to the Senator’s bill, a tiny clause of non-essential pork.

I was surprised to see it in a circular frame as the subject of someone’s needlepoint, and I never imagined it would become a piece of ephemera tacked above a booth at Applebee’s.

I shielded it from my children for reasons I cannot explain.

To be honest, I did not expect these words—wrought like a prose poem, forged in a letter, and disguised as a confession—to be known. I have come to accept a balance of inoffensive rejection and slight encouragement, something that you and I are both learning to deal with on separate but parallel fronts.

I secretly hoped that a far away journal, to whom this was originally sent, would’ve fallen for this experience in the same way that women who do needlepoint speak of their deceased husbands: with adoration and longing that is familial, even if it is not true.

With an unlikely acceptance I would tell you how I waited patiently through seasons of slow decay and snowy slumber, how I anticipated a contributor’s copy to arrive, coupled with an extra purchased copy, because loss and forgetfulness are synonymous in our worlds right now. I would inform you of how I resisted opening it when the mail carrier, the same one who shepherded my plea, handed it to me. I would wait for you, my intended audience of one, because this is and from now on will be part of our story.

I want to come clean and make my confession as you remain sequestered in your Alzheimer’s facility, moored to an immovable wheelchair: how nothing of this story is true, except for the part about it being our story.

I also know it doesn’t matter.

And so this is what we do when the only guarantee is nothing shall be remembered. I make up plausible stories that turn ridiculous to pass the time, ones that keep us both endlessly surprised, if only to avoid the looping plotlines that otherwise fill our space. It keeps me from growing frustrated, wanting to plead the disease out of you, where futility exists alongside my embarrassment. It affords me the permission I otherwise cannot grant myself, to spark a tiny glow in your eyes that lately has been so dim, and validates this absurd string of white lies and fabrications, especially when I believe you’d say—see, you did get people’s attention. Yes, and maybe even yours, with the knowing, shameless boasting of a parent who, behind such dense fog, knows her own son.