Blessed Be the Dust

A love poem to leaving

I took you to the park when you were five months. It had been one of the first warm days in April, the light staying longer, the air smelling of new growth and possibilities.

I placed you inside a baby swing, two baby legs through two round holes. You had on a white bonnet blooming with eyelet flowers, a crocheted sweater that tied around your neck in a bow.

I pushed you gently, back and forth, your face beaming straight into your eyes with the joy of flight.

It was the last day before my return to work at Western Union; return to the world of adults, phone calls, fashionable wardrobe, and self-importance.

I had been depressed at home; felt myself coming undone by the endless days with baby and my clingy self-doubt.

But that afternoon, in the early spring light, I pushed the swing and felt a thread of regret stretch through my heart. You were a knot in my freedom.

I was young; too wrapped up in the death of my marriage — the life I had so carefully constructed and now decimated by his booze and lies and my desperate need to be loved.

You were two, the day we moved to the ground-floor apartment. I gushed about our new home, windows that eyed the field of baseball diamonds and a toboggan hill.

You ran through the rooms, excited. You tripped over your own feet and split your lip on the track of a closet door. So much blood. Your cries more like howls.

Those five years in the apartment were a blur of men and drink and sadness and anti-depressants and the ever-so-long coming to terms with the disappointment of loss.

You suffered from night terrors. You’d cower in the corner of the living room, the hallway light throwing long shadows and scream: No Mommy! No Mommy! No!

I’d hold you close and beg you to see me through your terror-filled eyes. You knew even then something was off.

There were evenings I couldn’t wait for you to go to bed. I’d rush through the bedtime story because all I wanted was to forget what I lost. To erase the litany of wrongdoings.

Had there ever been moments of tenderness between us?

You were fifteen when you broke up with your first boyfriend and tried to kill the pain with booze.

Lean into it, I said. Cry it out.

Now it is you who has left; your bedroom robbed bare of clothes, your smell, your make-up and books.

I walked in yesterday and felt my heart split open. I wrote: I MISS YOU on a yellow sticky note and stuck it to the wall.

I miss your chaos of bras and sweatshirts littering the floor. I wish I could shout, Turn the damn music down! from the kitchen.

I shut my eyes and meet the ache inside. I knew your leaving would catch me off guard, so why am I so caught off guard with your leaving?

The pain is like age-old dust under the armoire; dust so old and thick it sticks to the floor when I try to sweep it out.

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