Moonwalker, Chapter 4

“Minerva?”

“Yes, Mom,” I droned. I knew I should have been more polite but I just didn’t have it in me to hear another lecture about how I needed to get down to Mr. Sleep and check out the mattress and box-spring sale that was about to end soon.

“Don’t you think it’s time you stopped sleeping on a futon on the floor?” she asked just about every time we talked on the phone.

“Those sales are always just about to end,” I muttered. I sounded sullen even to myself.

“I just thought you might like to get a comfortable night’s sleep for once,” she said, close to tears.
Shit, I’m an asshole, I thought--my standard reply to myself. My mom knew I had trouble sleeping. I didn’t bother telling her it was the moon that kept me awake. She’d just try to convince my to take Prozac like when I told her that Block Island was going to be flooded by a tsunami and everyone there was going to drown. I’d dreamed it one night when I had actually managed to sleep, so I knew it was true. That was the basic difference between us in a nutshell. I loved that phrase. Whenever I saw it I saw a world just like ours inside a walnut waiting for the right person to crack it open and realize it was just as real as this one right here where I was about to get in another pointless argument with my mother.

“I just want you to be happy. I don’t know what to do.” That’s how all our conversations ended.
“Neither do I,” is how I usually ended the conversation, but today I said, “Mom, I bought a sofa. I’m sleeping a lot better, I promise. It’s really not that bad here.” Which wasn’t true. I wasn’t sleeping and I hated Providence, where I’d finally decided to “settle down,” mostly because I was too depressed to get another job now that the island coffeehouse where I’d worked for the past ten years had been sold to a rabble of Del’s lemonade slurping semi-mobsters who only hired people in “the family.” I wasn’t sure if that meant actual relations, or people in the mob, but wasn’t about to stick around and find out. It may have only been a coffeehouse, but the Providence mob was notorious, at least in reputation. Nobody I asked could tell me anything the mobsters actually did besides go to strip clubs like The Foxy Lady and eat rare steaks and raw oysters on Federal Hill, but if they were anything like the mobsters on TV I thought it was best not to get tangled up with them, even as a peon. Also, I had my standards. I only worked for Bohemians whose focus was on the atmosphere, not the money, though I was always the first one to count the tip jar. I just made sure I looked really casual while doing it and not desperate to pay my rent which was the actual truth. Actually, it was true that I’d bought a sofa, so I wasn’t totally lying to my mother.

I felt bad for my parents. I always had. I remember being a kid and wondering what they’d done to get stuck with me. I may have looked like a typical four year old, but there was something as ancient and patient about my little face upturned to the clouds which cast a shadow on my forehead in the only photo I’ve kept from my childhood. Some kind of unexplainable, earned wrinkles like the ones around the eyes of a Galapagos turtle waiting in the crater of an extinct volcano for Darwin to make it to the top and claim its wisdom as his own without a protest, or even an attempt to defend myself by crawling away to hide behind a stone. Maybe I just wasn’t fast enough. I couldn’t remember. All I know is that when I look at that photo I saw two things--that girl knew things I don’t know now and needed to remember, and that I don’t in even the most remote way feel connected to her at all. I could be looking at some other kid or a baby orangutan, who was probably a lot cuter.

Something had slipped under my shell and sliced it right off, leaving my tenderness exposed. I lay there on Darwin’s ship, flipped on my back, legs wiggling in the salt air on that voyage into the unknown. My tears fell upside down toward the sky, even though they appeared to obey the laws of gravity in which water falls to nourish life on the ground.

So here I a, at 40, trying to settle down, still arguing with my mother about stupid little things that represent the gigantic disappointment I’ve turned out to be, still with no clue who I am and why I’ve been dropped on this planet, wishing I’d be transported off to one where there is no gravity and we are weightless, hovering above the surface without a care in the world. That's the world I want to live in. I bet that's where I’d be able to find myself.

It certainly isn't in the boxes my mom insisted I finally get out of her basement. The one time I opened them I had no recollection of having lettered in field hockey or of winning an Easter Bunny coloring contest sponsored by a toy store in third grade, of starring in a play as King Pythias in fifth, and I had definitely blanked out going to the prom dressed in a silver lamé puff-sleeved gown like an 80s Cinderella.

I definitely didn’t want to remember having sex with my boyfriend in a white tuxedo who posed with his hands on my waist like he owned me, which he did. I did whatever he wanted, fueled by cases of Piels Light and fuzzy navels. He thought it was him I couldn’t resist, but I knew it was the Peachtree Schnapps. I had to tell myself this, or I wouldn’t have survived the dead zone of degradation that spawned me, an eighteen year old existentialist already expert at sliding off a barstool.

Now, looking at the one memory of my childhood I wanted to hold onto—that photo—I see another story. The shadow between my brows that branded me as a seeker, that part of me that couldn’t be caught in time but shifted across my skin which hadn’t yet freckled after years of unprotected sun exposure. The shadow that told the world I would never be satisfied to settle down. The mark of the beast, I laughed to myself when I saw it. I’d been branded from the very beginning.

Not with anything as obvious as the devil’s 666, not with anything harsh or ugly, nothing demonic or even bold like so many of the tattoos my generation had etched into their skin to mark their identities in the world, I bore the weight of wings, both heavy and delicate, traced in light between my eyebrows, rising just above my unfocused eyes, tilted toward the clouds.
I don’t know if I was unaware of the camera or running toward it. All I can see is my longing to take flight and the belief that it was possible.

That’s what I need right now. I need to know if I can fly above the banal mess I’ve made of my life and get away from it all. I have a feeling if I don't, I'm going to wither away into dust the old lady in the apartment below me will sweep up and dump out the window.

And I need you to help me. Help me remember who I am and why I ended up in this apartment in Providence, Rhode Island with the blinds down. I’m inviting you to look into the eyes of my soul etched on my forehead along with sunspots and two lines between my brows. I’m saying look, here’s a butterfly just emerged from its silk cocoon, flapping its wet wings as the light streams down through the gaps in the green glow of the leaves it ate as a caterpillar, before it had wrapped itself in darkness without knowing it would be able to find its way back out.

My eyes, still unfocused sometimes, still shine green as those long-lost leaves. And they know a thing or two about jungles, which surprises me, since I’ve never been south of the equator. How did I learn how to wait in a tree through the day’s heat until the tiny deer whose back legs are longer than its front steps down to the river? How did I learn to puncture its brain with one bite so it died without knowing what I’d done? How did I know where to bury its body so no one else would find it, and to fall asleep in a tree afterwards, letting brilliant, blue butterflies land on my black fur? Who painted eyes on my wings, turning me into a waking dreamer?

In that photo, I am reaching toward a light I don’t remember. What I do remember was the shadow my daisy-clad body cast on the clover behind me, caught in time by the camera. I wish I could remember who snapped that photo so I could ask if that butterfly had been invisible or waiting all these years for me to find it.

If I ever found that person--when, I corrected myself, lying on my couch with the blinds pulled tight against the moon--I would ask for the reason beyond the reason--what broke the light? Where did the flowers go?