Love, Life, Letting go

The days have grown dark, and the woman looking back at me from the mirror no longer reminds me of myself. Instead, she reminds me of my mother mixed in with all the worst parts of my father.

After I’ve taken a shower, washed my face, and brushed my teeth. After the lights have gone out in the bathroom. I will enter my kitchen to find a single candle flickering on the table. My old water glass sits beside it, but it doesn’t look like my water glass anymore, it looks like my grandmothers.

After the day is done, and I’m ready for bed, I sometimes have the privelege of meeting with my long dead Grandmother again.

“Sit her, Mi Hija” her hands flicker towards the chair. “Take a load off your back, you’ve been carrying too much for too long.”

“What time is it Grandmother?” I ask, remembering all the times I would awake at 4am to find her already up and crunching numbers while she waited for her next pot of coffee to get hot.

Grandmother looks at me quietly and says what she always says, “Time old dogs are dead, Celeste. Aren’t you glad you’re a pup?”

I smile. I am not glad. I miss the old dogs.

“Come on, sit down, Celeste, please, sit.” The old dog won’t let up, but pup’s have a hard time resting. “You need to rest.”

And I do, but not as myself, I sit down as who I’ve become. My Grandmother smiles at my girlhood, remembering her own.

“What do I do?” I ask the woman, who I know, but who seems to be aging backwards in front of me, becoming someone who is different, younger, dumber, head over heels in love with her own life.

The young woman looks at me through the smoke of the candle and rolls her eyes. She pulls a cigarette out from behind her ear and lights it in the candle, exhaling the smoke with relish.

“You know, you don’t get to smoke cigarettes much when you die. You know that, Celeste? It’s true. And actually it’s life. It’s life…” she takes a drag, “It’s life that’s the only place where you can get ’em.”

She takes three long drags on her cigarette, three slow exhales too. I watch as her cigarette somehow grows longer with each inhale.

“I swear when I was living the only reason I quit is because I thought I would be able to smoke when I was dead. You can’t do anything when you’re dead Celeste, you can’t do anything but wait to be living again. Screaming, nekked like the first day.”

The cigarette smoke is in my nose, my eyes, my throat. There’s sharp ringing sound in my ears. The air is made up of grains. The outline of the young woman stands up from across the table. She ashes her last cigarette directly on the table, and walks out the door.

Her brown hair is long and slightly wavy, hanging down past her knees, nearly covering the flapper style cocktail dress she wore. I stare at the place where she had just been with just one thought pounding in my head…Do not give up on your rage.

— -

That night I sleep fitfully. I am haunted by everything all at once; thoughts of my life, my situations, my reality. My love life had been in shambles since the very early morning hours of the day of my birth, and a lot of things had always felt doomed.

Romance for one, was dead. At least if you’re like me and are harldy attracted to anyone other than yourself. The prospect of love for me has been tricky for sometime. Facebook search can tell you that.

If you typed, “Celeste’s crushes/interest/ and misc romance” into the search back you’d find lots of pictures. Pictures of my loves with their children, pictures of my loves with their partners, pictures of my loves in their obituatries. Always 1997 to some random date.

Cuz like, we don’t all make it. That’s a fact. And a lot of us are dead, that’s a fact too.

Tell me what you’re looking for, I bet you we have it on the wall.

Dead from suicide.

Dead from drowning.

Dead from hanging.

Dead from traffic.

Dead from trafficking.

Dead from drugs.

Dead from life.

Dead from deathe.

That’s really why I don’t look them up anymore, why I don’t leave my room anymore. Why I don’t come back home. It’s not because they’re dead, although I can see why it would be easy to think so.

It’s because when I loved themn they were alive. It’s because when I masturbate to the thought of them, they are still alive. It’s because if I really want to, if I try — I can keep them alright and alive, in my mind’s eyes.

Let’s talk about Magda first, Maggie, Magdalena. The most beautiful girl in 8th grade orchestra. She was tall, long in a stringy way that made me develop a slight attraction to noodles. She played the violin, and her long elegant fingers gliding across the strings made my own difficutly with the violin easier to handle.

She killed herself. I grew up.

When I fell in love with Magda she was depressed. I knew this, I was depressed too. The three of us walking shoulder to shoulder down the sidewalk. Isaiah on the side, and Magda in the middle, all of us in black jeans and black converse in the 100 degree New Mexico sun.

I didn’t understand my attraction to Magda until she died. I just thought I had admired her when she was alive. It sounds dumb I know, but that’s really what I believed.

Next, there’s Seleste. No, not like “Celeste” like me, but , “Seleste”, you know proper, with an accent over the e.

I met her in 6th grade, fell in love with her in 7th. For two years “I Luv Your Girl” by The Dream had blasted out of my alarm clock radio at 6:45am to wake me up for the day. For two years I got ready to Check On It by Beyonce, Obsessed by Mariah Carey, and No Air by Jodan Spark while thinking about her.

Seleste Orona.

I could never roll my r’s but I still loved the way her last name rolled off my tongue, Orrrrrona. Seleste Orona. She was beautiful and the boys saw it too. I would see her coming back from skipping with red eyes and rubbed off lipgloss. I always lent her mine, exxxxtra sticky ;), when I noticed. I liked the way my own name, “Celeste” got sticky on her lips.