grin and bear it

it took her nine months. not at all a coincidental number, not for chris and cathy, who couldn't have a child together. and life, like it had in the attic, as it always had, moved on without her---the charity foundations and trends and her grandchildren, too. victims of her temporal vertigo. she crafted the paper flowers in if there be thorns, and again through the lonely months in seeds of yesterday. she let her head poke out the window and into the light, where the slate shingles would have been where her and chris made vows she never previously alluded to. with all chris's talk towards the end of fita, before their escape, of how if he died first, if cathy died first---if she slipped from that rope and fell, he'd follow soon after---how could they not have made in life and death a promise? she decorated again with the snail and worm. she thought of the blue-misted mountains that always whispered to her as dead virgins laid out in jagged rows. chris, with his photograph of her on the roof, the version of her she feels so disconnected from and puts on a pedestal---for it must be this attic-faced girl he loves, not her, not her as she is---often wished it was them in the attic again. when you crawl out of the grave, do you miss the embrace? cathy and lady catherine, who was it buried alive? sin eater of the family that she was, she stored it all within her so she could play the pessimist with the windowpane face, ready to be cured by her optimist doctor. it took three months for her miscarriage, and this second term of theirs, a grief carried like pregnancy, took a full nine months to burst open like grief often does. if there’s no one to love you, you wilt away.

nemali picking up her fita set and the woman checking her out exclaiming that back in the day, her and her best friend devoured those books together, and nemali saying she was reading it with me. my mother calling twenty pages from the end of seeds of yesterday and asking what I was reading. she flew into a rant about how she’s still so angry with corrine, the paper flowers in the attic, how everything has still stuck with her after all these decades—when I chime in that corrine was a victim, too, and that is also a tragedy. it does not escape me, saying these words, that I’m thinking of my mother and I, especially not when we talk of generational abuse and curses.