Golden Girls

It had a been warm summer day in the park when my mother gave the locket to me. It was a dazzling gold heirloom as she tenderly placed it in my small eager hands. The July sun melting us like giggling candles as we lounged in the grass beneath the singing canopy trees. I was 10 and my mother took us here to this hill every Saturday afternoon to watch the day with me. We would lay on cotton white sheets and pick out fluffy animal shaped clouds in the sky. Kings morphing into the dragons they’d slain, framed by a vast unsullied blue. It seemed to go on forever, and those were the days I wished it had. We would eat peanut butter and strawberry jelly sandwiches and belly laugh for hours. She would chase me barefoot through the trees as I feigned terror trying to escape the beautiful monster. I always wish I had looked like her. The summer days shimmered in her eyes as if they knew it was her favorite time of year. She let her strawberry blonde hair lose, curls hugging her shoulders. They bounced as we ran, her white and blue sundress dancing with her. Soft flashes of robins-egg appeared as we rounded the bends of the trees. Those twinkling brown eyes matched the color of her freckles, warm and soft, like the chocolate chip cookies she always managed to burn but would buy me ice cream anyway to make up for it. I had never seen anything like her, even in my youth I knew she was different, ethereal. But as I got older the world began to change the way I saw her, the way I saw myself. I got angrier, meaner, without even meaning to. I stopped going to the park, stopped laughing and running and listening to her when she would talk to me. I could see the hurt in her eyes as I would leave the house to go hang out with my friends. Leaving her sullen figure behind as she quietly prayed for my safe return home. A sadness I didn’t understand framed by the buttercream walls. I would make some snide remark telling her not to wait up and would close the front door without even a morsel of her gentle response to be heard. A half-hearted cruelty turning off the porch light and vanishing from any obstructed view she might have had. I would go to parties, kiss boys, and let everyone around me convinced my young soul this is where I was meant to be. To forsake the people that loved me so I could make room for the tattooed cretins and silver-studded misfits instead. Their smiles and hollow eyes replaced the ones of my mother. I shunned her light, lusting after dark unfeeling bliss. I danced like the witches around bonfires, the crackling embers warming my bones as my soul tethered to the black smoke that wisped into the sky out of our Earth into the milky way. A wicked marrying of the two. I was making demons, chasing them in and out of euphoria, nothing like the airy make-believe safety my mother encompassed me in. Swishing and swaying like the liquor in my cup, I would spin round and round and round, staying in the same spot. A permanent resident of a sweet hedonistic prison. This went on for years. I picked other people over her and would listen to less wise words of wisdom. I was making my own path and my own way however wrong it was, and I wasn’t entirely sure when or why I severed our ties, but it must have been around the time I met my first boyfriend and we moved to the city together. She cried as I hugged her and I rolled my eyes, assuring her I would come home soon. The phone calls between us lulling due to how absent my presence was. I was 25 when she died. I had been standing in my apartment overlooking a park that was too familiar when I got the phone call from one of her sisters. It had been a car accident. She was coming home from the grocery store when she decided to text me. I told her I preferred that over phone calls. I sat on my couch for two days staring at a black TV. My boyfriend was somewhere doing something for an extended period of time I couldn't tell you what it was. Nor did I care. I didn’t move, I didn’t eat, I just sat staring until an ache rose into my throat and I clutched my neck. I teleported to that park those summer days, that hot July afternoon when she gave a locket to me and kissed me on the nose. The iridescent setting glinted off the necklace and cast rows of gold striping along her face and hair. It was almost as if she was forged from the same gold place also. Only at that thought I got up my perched position, my back aching from my stiffened catatonic state. I began ransacking my bedroom. It had to be here somewhere. Boxes of shoes flew from the closet, a cat yowled as it scurried into the living room taking up its hiding spot under the sofa. Closet hangers littered the floor, memories were torn from compartments I had stowed away. Movie stubs and letters in bright highlighter I kept from high school. Wristbands from bars and concerts. Poems I wrote when I wanted to be a writer which felt like lifetimes ago. I piffled through my jewelry box. Glittering reminders of past lovers and my teenage shoplifting days. But no necklace. It was gone, my mother along with it. And she had died trying to reach me.

Her bitch of daughter who couldn’t have been bothered with her.

The funeral was 4 days later, arranged by my aunts and other distant family that had built a relationship with her these past few years. Loved ones that saw the value in her warm brown eyes and were touched by her gentle soul made of summer light. My boyfriend drove me, I forgot how we had even gotten there. The rolling hills and foliage strobed past me in fits of light and darkness as I stayed in a daze that did not dissipate. The service was beautiful and short. I said nothing, spoke to no one even as they squeezed my shoulders, their condolences lording over me like dark rainclouds. I headed to my childhood home not far from the park where we used to play. It was quiet and uneasy. I could still feel her somehow. I found the spare key in the blue and red painted bird house we had made together hanging like a faded memory by the front door. The hues I had chosen to make the robins and the blue jays feel safe together. The paint was chipping and yet she never took it down. I walked through the front door looked around peering in at the dining room and breakfast nook, the etched archway of my growing height over the first decade of my life. I trudged up the steps of the small foyer, everything feeling heavy yet hollow and painfully familiar. I felt like an intruder, like I wasn’t supposed to be here. I didn’t deserve to be. I walked down the hallway but stopped once I got to the precipice of her room, her sweet-smelling perfume blanketing the air. My breathing hitched and I let out a small gasp and pressure began to crush the inside of my chest. I waited for what felt like an hour before I entered her room. Pictures of us in colored frames, some I had decorated as a child, dominoed every nightstand and dresser. Small monuments, tokens, of the love she had for me and I for her. I desperately wished she had remembered me this way and only this way. I turned on my heel, heading quickly for staircase landing. I stopped abruptly there only to notice the small door latched three feet above me. The attic. A flash of memories came clicking into place, finding their groove and nestling there. It nearly knocked the wind out of me, my mother’s lilac and orange blossom perfume fumigating my lungs along with it. I squint my eyes as they began to burn, my sorrow and self-loathing pooling over the edges. I wiped them quickly before pulling the string to the door down. The only string left attaching me to her. I remembered the attic.

I peered up the steps, light beaming in from the windows overlooking our backyard. Mom had hydrangeas flowing from every corner and I could see the purple seafoam flurries as I reached the top step. There it was. The small wood table from where we would eat sweetcakes and clink our ceramic teacups on rainy days when the park was muddy and the sky was gray. Where she taught me how to play cards and never let me win. We painted the walls on my 8^th birthday. My childlike drawings out of place next the grace of her paint strokes that curved into petals and rabbits…into a mother and daughter laying in warm summer grass. I ran my hand over that part, swallowing whatever wanted to bubble up and over without my consent. Just as I caressed the flecked white paint of her sundress, I felt hand run over me, stretching, reaching. I whirled to the entry way behind me. Silence, stillness. My eye caught the corner of something green peeking out from behind a large box labeled Christmas ornaments. Its square edges worn and familiar. I closed the few feet from where I was standing to survey it better. I picked it up, the material was rough in my hands like pine-colored sandpaper. As I lifted the lid off the box my heart dropped into my stomach. My locket lay untouched, resting on preserved memories waiting for me. It seemed smaller somehow, its glow dulled slightly as if the pendant was in mourning also. I pressed the small notch on the side and I saw the picture of my grandmother framed in the left arch that made up the heart and a picture my mother holding me in the other. I snapped it shut instantly to keep from falling to pieces on the attic floor. I felt rough engravings on the opposite side and when turned it over I saw on the back was etched

To my daughter

Whom I will love all my years

To my daughter

You are forever cherished here 

That phantom hand ran over me again and I whirled to find myself alone in the attic once more. I wiped my eyes and fastened the locket around my neck, holding the heart there before pressing it to my lips. I tucked the box underneath my arm close to where my heart was beating. It had been filled with newspaper clippings and birthday cards she’d kept as I walked back to the stairs. I couldn’t bring myself to leave any piece of her behind.