Thank you so much for this class! I truly enjoyed being able to write about making it through a crisis, and reading through everyone else's work has been wonderful. I wrote about the child my mother lost when she was very young with her first boyfriend, and with my complicated lifelong relationship with her memory.

 

 

GNOSSIENNE

 

When I was three, my mother told me about the daughter before me,

How she had been a tiny bundle of screaming, raw life

Until she wasn't.

For years afterward I dreamt of her obsessively:

As a toddler walking hand-in-hand with our shared mother down a cloudy beach

Until she would wander off into the sea

And simply disappear.

As the child she would have been when she would have had to start curbing our mother's worse impulses.

I wondered if she would have been more successful at it,

From her lofty platform of an extra eight years;

If she would have wanted to throw herself in front of the world for me as readily as I did for my siblings 

Before I would remember that her life and family would have been entirely different from mine;

That her very existence would have kept us from being here anyway. 

I wondered if the fact that she had died so soon after leaving the womb

(barely long enough to even get a name)

Meant that was her proper home that my siblings and I had just been guests of for a bit;

If I had somehow eaten what was left of her soul, like those stories about the people who find out they were supposed to be a twin in middle age

When they try to give blood and find that their body has contained a hidden genetic mystery tour for decades,

And now I was carrying some piece of her around, showing her what living life was like;

If, as she never really got to age, she was truly my older sister, or a perpetual younger sibling I was doing a terrible job of protecting just because she lived behind my eyes.

I'm still not sure today even though I haven't dreamt of her in years.

Honestly, I don't know if ever will.