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Show Moon -175 In the soft light of this garden, nothing washes, nothing about my sense of injury comes clean. I was using Alice just as falsely as she was using me. I took Alice from herself, insisted that she be my mother. All those years of waiting for my turn, and someone was going to see me, hear me, love me Right. I have been, I see, consumed by my need for my mother. Suddenly I am lying belly down in the grass, the thyme pressed to my lips. I curl into a ball, hugging my knees to my chest, and say, "Forgive me." After a while, I get up, and decide I ought to leave. I've done what I needed to do here. It's time to let Aunt Alice go. The "next leg of the journey." This expression, Anne thought, could lend itself to a joke or two, with the cane for flourish. The words people used were so often more amusing in themselves than for what they were supposed to be saying. Take, for example, the word "falling." Falling in love, falling for a line, falling off the roof, falling from grace, falling on your face, falling out. Fallen arches, fallen civilizations, pride Cometh before, the season of death. The Black Liberation people were talking now about how the word "black" is used to connote things negative, things forbidden, things, well, dark. Anne thought a movement ought to be started to clear the names of people who fall down. Was she, by force of associative language, a "fallen woman" as well as a woman who falls? Ashes, ashes, we all fall down. The black plague. Rats spinning on the cobblestones. |