How About Them Apples? (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
applespice) wrote2010-12-08 10:22 pm
applespice) wrote2010-12-08 10:22 pm
Entry tags:
LJ Idol - Week 6 - Not of Your World
All my life, it felt like we occupied neighboring stars rather than neighboring states. I looked like the daughter she had raised, but I haunted hallways like a wraith, craving silence and isolation while others laughed and beat the floorboards with running feet. When I hugged her, the contrast in our skin and clothes brought more distance between us, an invisible, intangible barrier. Her world, to me, was small and meager, dirty and cheap. It made me uncomfortable, and even though I only saw her once a year, I couldn't leave her cramped and leaning house soon enough.
When I was fourteen, after the death of my grandfather, she was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. Suddenly our family trips up to Arkansas included visits to a nursing home, a place that I loathed more than I had ever disliked her tiny house. She lay curled under faded sheets, skeletal beneath papery skin still dark from years spent laboring in the sun, her dreamy eyes picking me out from the sun-whitened wall. She didn't know me, of course. I was sure that I had been one of the first to go. There were photographs of me pinned to her wall, but I knew my mother had put them there. I might have been a patch of sky, or a tree in the shape of a girl. She was farther from me than ever now, her eyes picking out worlds beyond worlds, phantoms and dreams. I wanted to reach out and comfort her, bury her frail fingers in my strong, healthy hands, and help her remember. But who was I to her? A strange girl in the corner, nothing more.
The last I remember of her was visiting on a "bad day." She moaned and fought against my mother's embrace, her nightdress - one my mother had given her, painstakingly picked out, lovingly wrapped - flapping and twisted around her matchstick legs. My mother wept on the ride home, quietly, hoping we wouldn't hear. After months of hoping and praying and crying, she knew it was the end. My grandmother died just a few days later.
When my mother went back to the leaning house to pack up my grandmother's possessions, she found a small basket of fruit-shaped soaps in her bathroom, proudly displayed on a rickety shelf. I had given them to her, years before, on the one Christmas I remember spending at her house. I was seven, and bursting with the importance of giving a gift - one I had paid for myself out of my chore money. She hugged me, genuinely touched, though I had forgotten her smile in the intervening years. Cradling those soaps in my hands, I felt her more closely than I ever had in life, as though she were only a breath away. Briefly, softly, our worlds touched for the last time.
When I was fourteen, after the death of my grandfather, she was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. Suddenly our family trips up to Arkansas included visits to a nursing home, a place that I loathed more than I had ever disliked her tiny house. She lay curled under faded sheets, skeletal beneath papery skin still dark from years spent laboring in the sun, her dreamy eyes picking me out from the sun-whitened wall. She didn't know me, of course. I was sure that I had been one of the first to go. There were photographs of me pinned to her wall, but I knew my mother had put them there. I might have been a patch of sky, or a tree in the shape of a girl. She was farther from me than ever now, her eyes picking out worlds beyond worlds, phantoms and dreams. I wanted to reach out and comfort her, bury her frail fingers in my strong, healthy hands, and help her remember. But who was I to her? A strange girl in the corner, nothing more.
The last I remember of her was visiting on a "bad day." She moaned and fought against my mother's embrace, her nightdress - one my mother had given her, painstakingly picked out, lovingly wrapped - flapping and twisted around her matchstick legs. My mother wept on the ride home, quietly, hoping we wouldn't hear. After months of hoping and praying and crying, she knew it was the end. My grandmother died just a few days later.
When my mother went back to the leaning house to pack up my grandmother's possessions, she found a small basket of fruit-shaped soaps in her bathroom, proudly displayed on a rickety shelf. I had given them to her, years before, on the one Christmas I remember spending at her house. I was seven, and bursting with the importance of giving a gift - one I had paid for myself out of my chore money. She hugged me, genuinely touched, though I had forgotten her smile in the intervening years. Cradling those soaps in my hands, I felt her more closely than I ever had in life, as though she were only a breath away. Briefly, softly, our worlds touched for the last time.
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Beautifully written.
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