Pattern Of Collapse

Dear Mommy is crayola orange on the construction paper, careful not to cross the stick-lines of Mom with a frown and downcast eyebrows in a dress, the words can't cover the paper and she crumples it and cries. The circle with the brown stuff mostly inside the lines peers out of the waded paper from the corner of the room.

Dear Mom, the lines of the diary are mostly empty but the rain of the week forces her to stay in the locked room and reach inside herself for understanding. You can't know me, she scribbles, you don't try, she adds. You don't see me, she reaches out for the glass and watches the rain. The phone rings, the diary closes--unfinished entry, unheard words.

"Mom, I'll be over at my friend Melanie's house. I'll see you on Sunday." The magnet holds the scrap piece of paper on the metal hood of the oven and she locks the door while the impatient car honks. He revs the engine and she glances at her reflection in the glass of the screen door. Her lips are deliciously red and her hair is blinding black and her eyes shine with mischief. The weekend opens like his car door as she slides inside and escapes.

"Mom, how are you?", the metallicy distance seems artifical across the phone lines even though she is in the same city, mere miles away. The customary call on Sunday, the routine conversation, the casualness of their separating lives pierces in the usual places. These hurts will be numbed soon, afterward, and the night rolls onward. School doesn't enter her thoughts, nor does anything of future importance nor does the doldrums of responsibility in her aunt's pleading entreaties of wisdom; she hears selective words and cuts backwards with a sharp-witted tongue. Her beauty is blackened with the darkness of her history, black eyes, black hair, black clothes, caustic sarcasm and dreary music. Her cologne is dank and seductive, sprayed from white spikes that light on backporches in the silence of the slumbering house and cooled by secreted amber drops that echo the crumpled circles of childhood.

Mother's Name--Age--Reason for Admission--Describe the condition--Any known allergies? She grew up quickly, the silent miles into the town from the distant life she'd blown windward into and collected, like swirling leaves in a captured corner, only made her understand herself deeper. Nowdays these moments Mom doesn't see the adolescent attitude, doesn't recognize the infrequent visitor, or the little girl with the pouty mouth and broken crayons. Without him by her side, the unimaginable creep of blackness and the drawing void of emptiness would finally put her beside her Mom, sharing the days together, taking long walks, becoming the legacy she has fought so violently and steadily and vehemently to deflect from herself. She steers the mini-van in the rain with the heavy guilt of a lifetime evading a predestined pattern of collapse.