Self-Portrait

I don’t want to go to the neurologist, but my family insists something is wrong because I am rhyming words and predicting the weather. I knew my daughter-in-law would have an affair before my son because I watch Spanish soap operas, not for the Spanish lessons, but the expressions. Que lastima. What a pity my son is blindfolded to his wife’s wildness. I knew my husband would die without saying goodbye because he believed we would meet in the next life, but I know there is no afterlife, no meeting place where we can meet for a drink or two. I wish I could have told him nothing was as miraculous as that first day when he smiled at me and said I looked like Pocahontas. I wore braids then to keep my hair wavy, not curly. Now I let it just be curly. I let things be. The daughter-in-law. The son. The husband who won’t like my hairstyle. But he’s dead and, as I said, we are not meeting again. I know I repeat myself. But repetition is what makes certain songs stay in our minds. We repeat lyrics. Then find the words when we need to sing. I am singing now, but my family thinks I am off kilter, given to flights of fantasy, bereft of my marbles. I didn’t know they wanted a Betty Crocker mother who couldn’t carry a tune.

This piece was featured in Volume 4. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Braids and the Meaning of Life

As a child, I was in awe of girls with braids. Girls whose hair was set in strictures like Sunday sermons. I saw how hair could be parted in one quick stroke, the sharp bite of the comb moving down the scalp. How their braids lay thick as whips along their back. Even the coarsest hair could be mastered with toothy combs and tubes of gel. But I was a strubbly child. My hair stood out, defiant, headstrong. Uncontainable. I kept trying to learn the art of braiding with my dolly, twisting and turning two clumps of hair around each other―but I could never form a braid until I watched my friend’s mother separate her hair into three equal strands I could follow as they took turns winding over and under each other. So much of life, I found, is composed of three, like the primary states of matter. Even the pole star, it seems, is really three stars in one. Not to mention the three-person God I tried to divine at school. That strange family of men. Is it some stubbornness that makes me need a third proposition to defy life’s Either/Or? A theory like a braid, whose even coils I longed to feel, twining down the center of my back.

This piece was featured in Volume 4. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.