Dear Mom,
I can’t believe it’s already been a year and a half since you passed. It seems just yesterday that I was standing at your grave for the unveiling. Suffice it to say, life is still much of a blur. I still carry a welt, a thickness in my throat that at any moment can push tears up and out. Things have changed, a lot of things. You would not be surprised. I still can’t shake the feeling that my life is more than half over and that I havn’t been able to actually do anything yet. I refuse to let that dis empower me, and, ironically, on this one year and six month mark I embark on a new chapter. One of those things that I wish I could call and talk to you about, I think you’d be happy for me mom, proud of me even. I can’t help feeling bad at the same time though, the way things are… I can’t begin to even explain, foreshadowing and all. Amazingly so, I am finding out, that however unique our experience was, the aftermath is pretty similar- Obviously with it’s own pepper and salt, but the general guidelines have been misconstrued enough that it seems like a script. Finding a way to sift through it all has been a unique and individual process- but is still producing the same response that was instilled years and years ago. It would be nice if anything was just a little different, just to the right or the left- or up or down- but it’s not, it is simply as it was written long ago, the strife merely a pre-cursor, I know you understand what I mean.

Mom, it really meant a lot to me that you told me that you were proud of me and my art work right before you fell silent. Of course I wish I had known that earlier, but I am so grateful that you told me either way. I still feel badly that I had to leave you, for the moments I missed… you know, I remembered the other day something, the time when I was about 8 and my Dad asking me to move in with him, I told him no because then you’d be alone, I never told you that, I couldn’t leave you alone. I love you Mom, each day I try not to regret- I just think of your smile- no matter how it chokes me up, it’s what I’ve got.

I love you.

♥