04/16/2010

Frigid as  I wish to be

Frail as I am

Linger outward litany

Abuse of the man

File away the anger

Swallow fast the hate

Linger yet the ignorance

Sooner yet the wait.

 

Staccato tempo beating through my veins.  Proof positive that I live.  Proof positive that this coursing, livid emotion is reality.  Thumping me none too gently.  I shelter ‘neath the insignificance of facade and realize that my holes are growing visible.  Needle and thread to mend shan’t be of use here.  There is reality.  There is life.  There is a bitter and complete insignificance.  Yet, a significance.  In some ways I wield a power to great, and in others I’m powerless to stop the tides of life and need and want.  

 

A phone call from the darkness lingers on in my head.  My own voice cracking with the urgency of my pleas.  The deaf ears upon which those pleas fell, and yet the confessions of love and adoration from the lips.  My own heart clenching, freezing, breaking, trying to mend.  All within the confines of a desperate conversation.  False success, and imbecile relief ripped to shreds an hour later by a second shadowy conversation.  Desperation, aching and filling.  Not enough.    Now silence echoes across that distance, and I am left but to wonder, and pray and hope and fear.  Knowledge incomplete and futility of mine own actions melding to exert a greater than necessary force on my psyche.  

 

A comment made, of a perceived slight.  Magnify, explode, fill, sustain, ache and pain.  Sweet relief granted to another, an utterly sincere and achingly true apology. Yet it lingers.  Yet it grows.  Yet it fills.

 

A day of wind, a day of color.  Color flying through the air on strings held in tiny hands.  Little legs run, voices lifted.  Smiles shifting from face to face to face, laughter echoing along with squeals.  Two children sit by a wall, missing the fun.  Consequence of choices made, one sits for all the wind, one for only part.  The child is granted a reprieve.  My choice.  My decision.  My consequence. 

After the wind and the color cease little bodies sit and watch a screen.  Mary Poppins is singing about a Spoon Full of Sugar, and they are absorbed.  Then comes the call.  A child to go home.  My child to go home.  The child that was against the wall, but finally granted a reprieve.  The child who told me this morning that he was "moving back in with Mom".  Something I dismissed because it is a legal impossibility.  Either way.  I walk up to the front with him, where his Aunt is waiting and ask.  The response makes my breath catch in my throat, and my heart to break.  Not mom, but Grandma.  Gone. That fast.  The tears were not  far from my eyes or Aunt’s eyes.  I hugged him tight, told him I would miss him, and that I loved him and then he was gone.  

Gone.

August to April.  A child who I have literally bathed, clothed and cared for.  Half of his clothes I bought for him.  His backpack too.  

Gone.

A child who has been so damaged, and is so desperate to be loved.  Hell in the classroom, but so much loved.  My heart is breaking.  Since August I have poured my heart and soul into this child.  Since August I have mothered him, counseled him, loved him, disciplined him, been frustrated and angry with him, despaired of helping him.  I have wanted to bring him home, home to stability and care and love, all the things he really needs. 

The tears did come as I walked away.  They continued coming all day.  They trace a course down my cheeks now.  

 

I ache for him.  I fear for him.  I worry, I obsess.  I despair that on his last day he was made to miss part of the festivities.  

 

 

 

Gone.