the pink light by emily rita roche
My mother is mine until the forever that lasts longer than a body.
Our attachment moves beyond this realm. It shifts and distorts, wearing the color of time as a damask veil.
The clouds that float between us aren’t a hindrance. They fill the shape she hasn’t come to see yet. The shape of me and my becoming.
I came to love her voice in silent conversations. Ones that pass like clouds, absorbing the feather of her knowing. In this I formed, a poppy seed in her belly.
She knew before she knew. She knew by the curve of her spreading hips, the sweat beading on the soles of her feet.
She carried me in a satchel packed with lavender and chamomile. Imbibed sweet liquids so that I may know sweetness.
I’ve always known my mother.
&&
When happenstance tumbles down the stairs, or catches itself on a wire hanger, there is always that pink light.
When I saw it I burst, a bubble popping under the weight of No, not yet. I don’t blame my mother. I just wait in the moon water stew that tells of more tomorrows.
I watch from heights beyond the known atmosphere. Stronger than those barriers broken by the sun, I hold her love. I hold my own love, which can’t be dug out. I’m not a hangnail, I’m the crescent shape of her cuticle.
My mother hasn’t realized yet: The pill is much mightier than the sword. A pill isn’t a goodbye, it’s a see you later. When she learns this, the world will shrink around her, saran wrapclinging to her hips, hugging the space between her thighs. The place where the pink light shines through the darkness of a lover’s room.
A door she was too inflamed to close.
&&
Just as cherries ripen on a tree, so they drop.
Wearing that badge of courage wore my mother out. An earthquake for an ocean.
When it waved goodbye she didn't panic. She picked up the phone and made an appointment.
She didn’t tell her lover, my once father, with his bullfighter jaw and his nocturnal eyes. His talent to fabricate truths out of misbehavior.
He showered her with sun lamps and turtles and trampolines. A sharp shooter with a megaplex heart, he couldn’t manage the knowing.
Loving him was like eating peas and carrots suspended in lilac gelatin.
He once opened a champagne bottle with a katana. When the insides bubbled over he tried to force them back inside. When that didn’t work he compartmentalized the moment until he forgot what they were even celebrating.
My mother pulled leaves of grass from the earth and split them in half. She shoved them in her ears until all she heard was the thump calling her home. The one she retreated to when her lover cried out in numbers instead of words.
The numbers added up to a fraction, always separated by that thin line, never truly touching, never truly whole.
&&
If the clock won’t stop ticking, just take out the battery. Or better yet, think of California poppies. It’s not hard when the orange yolk light penetrates your eyelids.
My mother did this and she turned out alright.
The nurse had an Our Lady of Guadalupe candle and a string of wooden beads. She splayed her fingers over my mother and let the spirit guide her.
Time sang No, not yet. But we’d meet again, under the ruffles of the willow, where love becomes truth.
&&
It’s not easy when caught shattering in place.
The meltdown disintegration of who she once was made for a bran flake summer. Enough to fill you up for an hour and not much longer.
The days lengthened with forever stickiness, drawn like taffy through the pulling machine.
My mother’s knees shriveled in chlorine sanitation. A pool isn’t as wide as an ocean, but it might as well be. She caught herself under waves of deception. Was it hers or theirs? This child with its princes floaties struggling to dive into the underbelly of sight.
The child went by many names. Most of them neurotic. Bumble Bee and Darling One, My Only Sunshine. My mother called her Sweetheart, this doe eyed thing with no need for pleasantries. Just rainbow shaped mac n’ cheese.
She saw herself, mirrored in the gold fleck eyes that knew truth. She saw me, or what I could’ve been.
A reflection of self with its own set of rules.
At night she flipped through her paper crane scrapbook, pages edged with too-long tape, the cover marred with Lisa Frank stickers. A pair of baby Golden Retrievers bore the message, Puppy Love. She thought puppy love meant green when really it meant innocent. She thought love was knowing when really it was discovery.
On every page a different her. Dressed as Abraham Lincoln in a top hat and beard, trapped screaming in a high chair while covered in Spaghetti-Os, sitting half-asleep on the toilet.
Then the one with my mother’s mother before she stopped being that. Before she became a traveling circus selling novelty for a handful of peanuts. The sharp slope of her woman’s shoulders cut by the collar bone, delicate and struggling to hold her daughter up. The look of innocence on my mother’s face, the look before the discovery. And my mother in that moment, looking back but knowing all that came after, understanding that love isn’t bound by time or place.
And me, still loving her without a body.
&&
When you say sorry enough it sounds like a prayer.
The cat’s yowling for kibble, the grocery list slipping into the space between the fridge and the stove, the masterful pattern of olive oil burns on her left arm.
I’m sorry, she said, I’m so sorry.
I’m so sorry I couldn’t tell the difference between ripe and spoiled.
Time distinguished the need for sensory deception. From aching fingertips came spurts of sourdough that only sunk in the oven. The way her belly sunk after a morning of regurgitation.
Another man, a first love, only a phone call and a mile away, still somehow across that ocean, the great barrier. The illusion of distance slipped like seaweed from my mother’s hands, carried out on the last tide.
He filled the space she refused to see.
A Hello. An I’m sorry. Let’s meet up. At the park where the pines meet the palms. Where spit mingles with soil and bursts into fire grown poppies. The ones that dance in the sun, heads on stems looking too meager to stand upright, but strong enough all the same.
&&
Together is a word reserved for galloping in tandem. For the creation of a world of one’s own.
Their world centered on banana ice cream and smelling salts and bashful hands. My mother grew three sizes, from microscopic to fully bloomed. Her heart echoed with gusto in a chest cavity paved with diamond dust and ladybugs. The spotted ones told her she’d found the gray bricked house, the one where names are bestowed on those brave enough.
Her old-new man galloped about on horses made of porcelain, their tinkered hooves marking the time between then and now. He announced his presence with the drop of a pin, the butterfly effect of unmasking the subject.
My mother hopped on her toile beast and lifted her breast to the sky. No place for shame when remembrance is removed twice over. When its thread is weaved back through the fabric of existence.
The tremors faded. She didn’t have to hold her eyes open with Elmer’s Glue. She closed them tight and thought of the next to come.
She thought up names better than Sweetheart.
&&
Her body a vacuum and my soul a string on a Persian rug— we’ve always been drawn to each other.
This time is spelled differently, in another alphabet my mother can’t decipher. But she knows what it means. A feeling cut into bits and fused together with chemical persuasion.
This time, the pink light serves as an entrance.
Emily Rita Roche is a Las Vegas native currently transplanted in evergreen Ashland, Oregon. She holds a BFA in Creative Writing from Southern Oregon University. You can find her other work in Text Power Telling, Bullshit Lit, The Wellness Zine, Jokes Literary Review, and Wild Roof Journal.