Page 17 - WTP Vol. IX #5

industrial grey tile I lived on in my own freshman year of college.
After a moment of disorientation, standing in the midst of boxes and suitcases, unsure where to start, we set to work. I start pulling shirts out of a suitcase, folding them as carefully as I can—I don’t excel at this kind of thing—and placing them in drawers
that are too deep and narrow, made more for of-
fice supplies than clothing. My husband rips into a cardboard box, and with an impossibly small amount of floor space to work in, begins assembling a cheap set of shelves from Target. And my younger daugh- ter climbs onto the loft bed, spreads out the sheets and blankets, and hangs strings of star-shaped lights on the wall above the bed, attaching photos to the clips between the lights. We do all this with nervous urgency, as if by arranging these things perfectly, we can infuse them with our love and protection.
The morning we say goodbye, we eat breakfast in the large hall they call the Commons and then walk to
a parking lot on the edge of campus. She hugs each of us, and as she puts her arms around me I start to cry—how can I not?—and says, “Oh, Mom, you’re going to make me cry.” And she hugs me again and doesn’t let go. I wonder what I should do. I don’t want to let go. But it seems I have to. This is my job as a mother, or that’s what I’ve been led to believe,
so I step out of her embrace, and I climb into the car. She remains outside, waving, standing under a young tree. Her blue eyes shimmer with tears and by some trick of refraction become twice their size. I see the sweet child of eight months and eight years and not- yet-eighteen, and I see a woman perched on a preci- pice, an anime hero with lakes for eyes. Then we are moving, rolling down a hill away from her, and now her forehead is out of sight, now her white wrist, gone, and I don’t know how I can keep doing this thing called life, how I can survive the new hole in my center, how any of us do. You walk around bleed- ing inside for the ones who leave. Physically, you grow weaker, and death looms ahead. You want to lie on the sand and surrender. But then a melody circles down, jabs you in the back, and forces you onto your feet and back into time.
Lillegard holds a master’s degree in English / Creative Writing from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. She recently completed two fiction workshops at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop summer program. She has published essays and book reviews in the Chicago Tribune “Books” section, and she is currently finishing a novel, Dreams Before Waking, about an eighteen-year-old boy who becomes involved in the world of professional wrestling.
“Isee the sweet child of eight
months and eight years and not-yet-eighteen, and I see a woman perched on a precipice, an anime hero with lakes for eyes.”
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