Fly Me to the Moon

I had only hap-hazardly packed up my room on the day that I was supposed to leave. I wished that I could slip out without anyone knowing, without causing a scene. I almost got away with it; my dad had only just found out that I was leaving that day. “What?!” he exclaimed, and then promptly went back to his crossword puzzle. And that was that. I could always rely on him for an easy exit.

My mom, however, did not offer me the same luxury. Even when I would go spend the night at a friend's house, I would try to sneak out, not because I wasn’t allowed, but because I wanted to avoid hearing, “You’re leaving me?? Why are you always leaving me!” So, I didn’t pack everything at once, I didn’t pack thick brown boxes with my name written in black sharpie on the sides full of my belongings. I decided I would trickle out slowly. I never liked ripping off the band aid. It always hurt, leaving a mark on my skin, and peeling it off slowly wasn’t too bad. It took longer, but it avoided the burn. 

It was 8pm when my mom said, “Margaret, just leave in the morning. It’s too dark to drive. There’s Coyote's on the road, what if you hit one? And the street lights aren’t bright in LA. Also, it’s cold. And you’re not going to make your bed at this hour, I know you, and you can’t sleep on a new mattress. You have to leave the window open and let it air out for at least a few days, actually, so maybe you should stay until Wednesday.” 

When I told her a few days earlier that money was going to be tight for the first few months and that I was worried about paying for all my expenses, she lit up and said, “Done. You’ll eat every meal at home.” She did everything she could to have me stay. Usually, her reasoning didn’t work. I would roll my eyes and walk out the door and say, “love you!” on my way out, because with all the worries and the rambling and the reasons as to why  I should stay, that’s what she had really meant to say. But this night, the night I was supposed to leave, I didn’t argue. I wasn’t sure I was ready to go yet either. 

The next morning, on the day I would actually leave, I decided to look through old photographs. Even though I had them stored in my head like an old slideshow, there was something special about holding them in my hands again, like an old book. I took photos of some, snuck a few in an envelope while my mom wasn’t looking. Then, just as I was leaving, after I had put away the last album, I saw that old and clunky VHS tape but I didn’t think to watch it. 

We were living on Garden street when I watched it for the first time. My babysitter visibly tapped her foot, but I didn’t care.  If I had a bedtime, it would have been well past it, but my mom and dad never enforced those things; at the end of each night, they didn’t want to say goodbye to me as much as I didn’t want to say goodbye to them. My babysitter plopped on the couch, and tried not to fall asleep. 

I was sitting by the window of the third floor apartment when I saw the black minivan parallel park on the side of the street. My warm breath fogged the frosty glass, creating an opaque cloud that eventually I would have to rub away. Stretching the fabric of my sleeve, I cleared the little window to the world, and almost just as quickly, the white cloud would form again, blending in with the ones in the sky. But now that I had seen them pull up to the curb, I left the streaky window, ran to the door, and waited patiently like a little puppy. 

“I found it!” I screeched, jumping up and down, holding the tape above my head. The babysitter collected her cash, and the three of us sat down and pressed play.

I sat far too close to the television.  The VHS crackled and popped, the sound cut off right when you needed to hear it. The video couldn’t possibly capture the beauty of that day, but it was all I had, and for that reason, it was perfect to me. The way my grandparents used to walk gracefully, the way my aunts dressed beautifully in black. A perfect day, a perfect beginning. Towards the end of the video, there was a final montage to the song “Fly Me to the Moon” by Frank Sinatra, complete with smiles from all the wedding guests, and the biggest smiles from who I knew as mom and dad, who had once only been newlyweds. Movie Stars, I would think to myself. They’re Movie Stars. Suddenly, from a place I couldn’t quite understand and a feeling I hadn’t known before, I felt the need to cry. I couldn’t understand how I could feel both happy and sad at the same time. It didn’t make sense in my little head, but my body took over and my nose started to burn, like an allergic reaction I couldn’t control. Droplets formed in my big eyes, and they slowly trickled down to my small round cheeks. 

“What’s wrong?” My mom asked. 

And the only way I could describe the way I was feeling was by whispering, “I wish I was there.” 

“You were,” my mom would say. And she believed it to be true. She thought to herself, Because what was life before Margaret?

The apartment was cold when I stepped in. The windows were drawn, there was no one to greet me, there was nothing on the walls. I mean, of course nothing was on the walls and of course it was empty. But the emptiness brought a stark and sudden realization that I was alone now, and I would have to build this all on my own. Suddenly all the decisions were my own, and now that everything was in my hands, I didn’t know what I wanted. I felt as empty as the room. I stepped outside of myself and observed from above; I looked so small, so alone. 

Feeling lost, feeling worried, I called my mom. 

“I don’t know where to put the couch.” 

“I’ll be right there.” And she was, and she fixed it, and everything was perfect. 

My mom never shied away from sharing her opinion on the way things should be done. And despite her need to be right, the ideas that she decided were always correct, she never imposed her own dreams or expectations on me. She didn’t have ideas of who I would be before I was born, and she didn’t try to guess. She didn’t have a name, no nursery. It felt wrong to her to decide who her baby was, what she needed, what motherhood would be like before I existed. So she waited patiently. And right before I came into the world, yelling and screaming, my mom said goodbye to the life she lived, because she knew it was all about to change. And it did, just as she had expected, the second she held me in her arms for the first time. My life was just beginning, and to my mom, it felt like hers hadn’t just turned a page, but it had started all over again. 

And because she never had expectations of who I would be, she was in awe of my ability to decide for myself. One day I wanted to be a doctor! Another day, an actor! Another day it was decided that I would marry Zac Efron. And my mom believed it was all possible. She believed I could be anything I wanted. 

She left just before I fell asleep that night. I prepared myself for the tears, but nothing came. I had so much to say, so many concerns, so much I still needed help with, because the position of the couch had never really been the issue, but I didn’t have the words. I wasn’t sure I would ever have the words for a moment like that. 

I kept my bedroom door open that night, turned off the light, and shut my eyes. 

My dreams were once vivid, painted with vibrant colors and characters. Everynight, my mind created a new movie to watch, a new world to explore. My dreams were so clear that sometimes it was difficult to know what actually existed. I would wake up, confused, and I would happily get back to real life. But as I got older, my dreams drifted away from the vessel that brought me to places that existed in fairy tales. Instead, my dreams turned into worries that would never come to fruition. I never believed in magic or spells anyway. My mind worked a little differently, sometimes. At one point, the dreaming stopped all together and I would find myself staring into darkness each night. 

When I was young, my mom was always able to bring me out of the dark corners I often found myself stuck in. Her voice soothed me; the first songs I heard were sung by her, from a time before I can remember. And even though I was too young to remember, the melodies of my mom’s voice were instinctually ingrained in my body even if I couldn't understand why, like how a baby is born, and even though the baby has no reason to know who anyone is, or what this new bright and cold world will be, they recognize their mom the moment they are skin to skin, the way they couldn’t with their dad. 

“What if I never know what I want to do, mom?” I asked my mom at ten years old. “What if I’m never good at anything? What if no one ever likes me? What if I will never be pretty enough? What will I do?” 

My mom would hold me close, and as she would try to change my mind about the things that worried me, she hoped that some things would stay the same.  The way I needed her, the way her reassurance and promise that everything would be ok was all I required to feel better again. She wished for this to be the same always.  And how all she had to do was tuck me into bed and promise me: You can be anything you want, my love, and how I still believed her when she said this. I used to fall asleep smiling, and tomorrow would be a new day where we could rise with the sun and fly to the moon. 

I wake up and find myself in the first room I ever had on Garden street. My dad is already at work,  so I decide to wake up my mom by jumping into her bed, arms sprawled, legs twisted in unimaginable directions. My mom is already awake, because if she hadn’t been, she wouldn’t enjoy this dance and charade quite as much. She is awake in bed, watching the sun rise through the window, waiting for her little girl and her knobby knees to come running in with her rude interruptions. Suddenly, she is a morning person. And then, in a flash, I wake up for a second time and I’m alone in my new apartment. 

It’s difficult to know when that stopped. When the mornings came on slower, when the nights lasted longer. It changed slowly, day after day, until one morning, it seems to happen again. The knobby knees, the wake  up call, the nazly high pitched laugh. But then you wake up, and you realize it had only been a dream, but it felt real because you thought you had forgotten how to do that, and suddenly you find yourself missing something that you forgot had been part of every morning. How sad it is to forget something so integral to your routine. How much it hurts to remember again. 

But as the years rolled on like the clouds in the sky, the nights became foggier, and the stars were difficult to see, and the ones that my mom promised would always be there started to disappear. And because the promises stopped being true, I stopped trusting her, so I found the stars elsewhere. Because somewhere around 16, you close the door when you go to sleep and decide that you don’t need your mom to tuck you in at night anymore. You prefer boys that you sneak in through the window, boys with starry eyes that burn like a flame in your heart. This is love, you think to yourself. The only love I’ll ever want. And without meaning to, you push away the person who still swears you are attached forever and ever. And they just watch you slip and slip away into the person you always promised they could be someday. They try to convince themselves this is growth. This is what is supposed to happen. This is what it feels like to let go, they think, because loving someone and letting them go never applied to romance; it was always about mothers and daughters. Because there was a world that I was building that my mom wasn’t included in anymore. A moon that I would fly to with someone else. 

… 

Someday soon, Margaret would truly leave home. There would be nothing left to pack, no more questions about furniture. A shut bedroom door became miles of distance between the two, and goodnight forehead touches would be replaced with weekly phone calls.  

She would leave one day with the final bags in her hands and her head full of doubts. Just as the door shut, she would glance swiftly back at her mom, at her dad and her dog and her home and said, “well, I’ll be back,” and all of them, the dog included, pretended to believe that maybe one day she could; maybe one day she would.  She would wait for her mom to say one final, “You need a sweater!” but her mom was quiet, because there was nothing left to take. So her mom would watch her walk away with her nose pressed up against the window, creating a fog, wondering where the years had gone. Missing the days of her daughter’s small little worries, worries that were small enough to kiss and make better and patch up with a band aid.  Now she would have to be a distant outsider. An observer of the life that she had created. Because she couldn’t sit by the window and wait for her to come home safely; home wasn’t with her anymore. 

But as the weeks grew longer, Margaret found herself sitting alone in her new apartment asking, What if I never know what I want to do? What if I’m never good at anything? What if no one ever likes me? What if I will never be pretty enough? What will I do? There was no answer. And the questions turned into statements as she heard the deafening echoes of quietude.  

Years later, back at her parents home, Margaret was looking for old photographs in her bedroom that looked the same as it did the day she left. Maybe she was finding a way to feel close to who she used to be, maybe she just wanted to hold the photos she had memorized in her hands again. She looked deep into the face of her younger self, searching for the familiarity, wishing it was a mirror instead of a photograph. Wishing nothing had changed, and that she could go back to the time when she believed she could be anything she wanted. And when it felt like almost all hope was gone, she found the old wedding video.

 “Does this still play?” she asked her dad. He took it from her hands, plugged the VHS player back into the TV, and it began. The image was a little more faded now, a little more crackled. It had aged the same way everything else had, but it was still there, the way most things still were. 

And then there she was. Her mom, the movie star. She got closer to the screen, studying her;  the way she looked, the way she moved, the way her eyes would smile more than her mouth would, the way she laughed so hard that her eyes shut, the way her eyes were always curious, wondering. She felt a slow fire begin in her chest, but instead of burning her, it warmed her. I look just like her, Margaret thought. She turned her gaze away from the screen to look at her mom now, and although so much had changed, her eyes were the same. And it all came back to her. Who she was had always been who her mom made her believe she could be. And that was all she had needed, it was all she had been looking for, and it had always been there, captured in the video that preserved a piece of who her mom was when she was just beginning her life, too.  She could finally see her reflection again as she looked into the window of her eyes. And without needing to say anything, she heard her answer again: You can be anything you want, my love. 

Tears started to form in Margaret’s deep, dark eyes, the eyes that hadn’t changed since she was a little girl. 

“What’s wrong?” She asked Margaret.

Margaret looked back to the screen, “Nothing. I just wish I was there.” 

Margaret’s mom smiled to herself. Maybe some things had stayed the same. And maybe, someday, they would still get to fly to the moon, together.