The Memory of My DisappearanceThe last time I saw Mother was that day in the yard when she snipped off the heads of perfectly pretty flowers—snipped them right off with the same orange shears she used to meticulously make my dresses, mostly smocked and embroidered with rose buds or tulips or sheep. Do not come after me with your tiny darting steps, she mumbled to those petals. Or did I mumble that to her? Memory is more feeling than fact. For instance: Once you pull out a single thread, the whole thing falls apart is something she said as she stitched a frayed seam over my heart. Thankfully, there was nothing careless about her. In some ways this is true and not true.

*

Mothers leave. These things happen. As it goes in fairy tales, the parent is mostly absent.

*

How shall I tell you the strange incident? Some days, it goes like this: Once upon my 25th year, Mother said, “What use is there in daylight?” then blurred into a photograph of a woman made invisible by the snow. Other days, this is all I can muster: Beat your chest. The stories here are wordless ones.

*

The last time I saw Mother she was transcribing the Lord’s Prayer with Alpha-Bits cereal and glue. She asked if I wanted to help, and also how was my day at school. I said sure and fine, respectively, then straddled a kitchen chair. Here, sort through these broken parts, she said. I need several more H’s and T’s. She was inviting in all of her strangeness, traced a smiley face over the crumbs. We listened to Bach on the radio, and she’d sporadically sound a small hum. But when I noticed her lips start to quiver, I was glad she didn’t say what she thought: Go look at that haze by the chimney! There are demons all over the roof! Although memory’s a tiny wrecking ball, this story’s a song of salvage. Cast out. Cast out. Cast out.

*

Though the dictionary’s full of the wrong kind of meanings, I sought the obvious. Schizophrenia (Latin), literally “a splitting of the mind,” is rooted in skhizein (Greek), “to split,” which is understandable. But then there’s phren, “mind,” and its genitive phrenos, “diaphragm, heart, mind,” which is of unknown origin / is the last time I saw Mother / is the anatomy of fear, which presents as racing heart, difficulty breathing, dry mouth, or hyperventilation, most likely on the kitchen or bathroom floor. My therapist recommends diaphragmatic breathing before Clonazepam; however, dosage may be doubled in acute cases, such as doubling over. Such as double from the Latin duplus is rooted in duo or “two.” Such as: there are two or several faces for every one / everyone. For instance, bi- (“two”), as in polar, was also noted in Mother’s chart, along with Schizoaffective, which leads me to affectus, from the Latin “state of mind,” which is something I’ve neglected during my circular search for the origin of one single moment of loss; as if meaning is history / is memory / is unfinished the way the past is unfinished

*

We should stop worrying what to call things.

*

The last time I saw Mother she was reclining on the divan, beneath a portrait of herself as a girl, painted on what must’ve been the saddest day of the year: her eyes born downward, the color of a dull, gray building. When I sat at her feet, she offered to braid my hair, and I fell into a trance. You aren’t really so pretty, she thought or said. My hands curled into fists; memory sketched in at the edge. I could swear her eyes were green.

—

Meg Rains grew up in Little Rock, Ark.; dropped out of music school; graduated from Emerson College; worked in advertising, the arts, psychiatry, philanthropy, et al.; took an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts; and nowadays lives in Richmond, Va., where she nine-to-fives in an office park. The author has posted a discussion of the genesis of this essay on the Brevity blog.

Photography by Michael McKniff