When I say that, I don’t mean that she actually went somewhere else. What I mean is: the shitty little cells that cluster together to muster up in sum total the person I used to know are now clustering in some inferior way and the person I know cannot ever be found.
My mother isn’t even really in my memory—because it constantly erodes. Everything is falling apart all the time.
People love to say it to you like it counts:
Oh, Lucia, she will live on in your memory.
Sometimes they’ll even touch your arm at the same time like they’ve earned it by saying something poignant.
The whole thing about people living on in memory is a crock of shit. The best you can do is try to remember what you can, and include the memories in your routines. But, sometimes that makes the real memories fade faster.
We’re just running down a fucking slope carrying these little flags, and one by one we get shot and we slump and our little flags are in the mud and no one picks them up. No one is going to keep running with your flag. Lucia, no one cares about your flag. I tell myself that. When you fall down it’s over.
TELEPHONE
I called the school and told them I was spending the day at the hospital. Immediately on hanging up the phone I realized this was a big mistake. If my aunt dies and the school knows, and now they know, then it could mean some kind of institutional business. I mean, they can’t send me away anywhere, I don’t think so, but—better to keep it all quiet as long as possible, and here I go calling them when I don’t need to.
Why not just fail to show up on Monday, and then on Tuesday bring a forged note? I think I called because I wanted to tell somebody what had happened. The sad little individual that I am wanted to hear somebody feel bad about how bad it was for me and wanted to hear a voice wish me well. That’s what happened. The lady at the main office, who I hate, she is really terrible (I see her talking on her cell phone outside the school entrance when I eat lunch there by myself sometimes—and she is just abominable), this very lady is the one who answers the phone (of course she is, she is the receptionist), and she listens to my pathetic retelling of my aunt’s stroke, which I feel bad about even as I do it, and she says, essentially, oh my little bird, you poor dear, oh you frail thing, of course don’t come to school. I’ll let everyone know.
It didn’t make me feel any better—in fact, I felt a bit worse, because she thought she had hung up the phone, and maybe a second later I heard her talking to someone else in the office about how she was going on break and could someone replace the toilet paper in the office toilet for once.
AUNT
I went to see my aunt and she was talking. First thing, I said maybe you should pretend to be in a coma so they can’t release you.
She said, it was fine. Someone from the soup kitchen, a woman my aunt has never liked, came to visit and is paying for all her care. She showed me a card the woman brought. It had a Jesus face on it (Shroud of Turin style). I guess she has a ton of money stuffed in a mattress or something, and is really kind. My aunt was kind of sheepish about it, because she thinks she is a good judge of people. Let me tell you—no one is a good judge of people.
I said, now you have to live.
Why?
You have to live so you can get the chance to be nice to her.
Right, my aunt said. I can live a little longer.
I asked her how long she was going to be there for. She said a week at least, because they had been finding some other things that were wrong with her. That’s the trouble with the hospital—they find all the things that have been killing you forever, and that you are okay with, you’re okay with those things slowly killing you, but then they find them and get rid of them, and then other things replace the things you were fine with, and you are not fine, not fine at all with the new things, and so you die, slowly, in utter misery, just the way you would have before, only before you were pretty okay with the manner of it, but now you’re not.
I told her my idea about writing some descriptions for her. She said she liked that idea, but I should make sure not to ham it up. She wanted good clean descriptions, no sentimentality. I was a bit offended, I said, who died and made you king, of course I won’t fucking write you sentimental descriptions just because you had a stroke and shat yourself.
It isn’t anyone’s fault what they do at a time like that, my aunt said. The ambulance ride was really bumpy.
I asked her did she really shit herself and she said no.
LUCIA SERIES
I got out my notebook and practiced doing typography. I realize it isn’t real typography. It is just me drawing some letters, but I tried hard and made it look pretty good.
I figure I will assemble it all and have it actually printed up on cardstock and give it to my aunt. She likes real books.
The cover proof I made looked like this:
Lucia Series 1-10
1 GARDEN
The garden is a pathetic little plot of nothing. Someone once laid stone down to serve as a walkway, but the stone has long ago cracked apart until now it must always fail at its mission, which is to give a person a place to put her feet when she walks there.
The beds, which are raised, or are supposed to be raised, are often broken open on one side or the other, that is, the wood boxes are broken, and the earth has crumbled out and fallen, so the raised beds slump here and there to the ground, crowding or occluding the path.
The choice of plants has no overall rationale. Essentially, the person who plants a plant in this garden does not think about any of the other plants when she does it, she thinks only of the plant she is planting and whether she likes it.
To say that this gives the garden a motley appearance would be a pretty far-fetched compliment. In fact, it makes it not seem very much like a garden.
The garden may be seen from the windows of the converted garage. It may be seen from the bench that abuts the garden just before the converted garage. It may be seen from the space where an automobile once parked next to the converted garage. It may also be seen from any of the twenty windows of the huge house that stands before the garden. Most of those windows are covered with curtains and blinds, however, so in reality, no one ever looks out of them, and that is partly because the landlord lives in only a few rooms of the house and has the rest shut up to preserve it, as if that were a thing.
A person can use the garden by: reading in the garden, playing an instrument in the garden if she has a musical instrument, singing in the garden, sitting in the garden, speaking to a friend in the garden, if she has a friend and that friend is dear enough to be permitted to see the garden, or walking in the garden. Walking in the garden is not much of a walk because the garden is fairly small.
Certainly, you can’t call the garden the gardens as some people do (regarding their own large garden).