Week One

There are some things meant to be written on paper, I think, with your hand, getting them splattered by ink and later getting the ink on your face when you reach to rub your nose, someone pointing it out later and you not feeling embarrassed at all about the smudge because you know that you were writing about something like the songs your mother would sing to you as a child. 

I never thought of her voice as beautiful, even then, but I knew that I wanted it singing those songs. I don't know why. Maybe because she wanted it so much, the pleasing wholeness of saying baby, my baby, my baby, my baby. As if the womb were white sheets and we could fold ourselves into each other with such a light touch.

I meant to carve birds out of the CDs so they'd shimmer and trick me into thinking somethings were flapping their wings in my room, but my hand's too shaky and the material too inflexible, so many of them ended up looking like dolphins or fish. For a while since I went away to school and my mother's the only one left at home with my dad, she took to calling dolphins her children, children she could see from her window. One friend heard her talking about the dolphins on the phone with such focused, frenetic energy that she was sure my mom was crazy. But she doesn't really talk about the dolphins as much these days.