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Show I had these realizations several years after the trip when I read the diary entries my mother had written after my birth. There wasn’t emptiness on the pages; in fact, they were completely full, until she decided she could not write in the diary any longer. My birth father was there and then he vanished. College had taken my mother away from her home, but knowledge could not fill everything. He brought her back. He filled my mother and replaced himself with me- a copy or a product, the result of a catalyst, the definition of a love child. One of my first memories is reaching for a jar of marmalade. My grandfather must have been there, because the next thing I remember is his low, singsong voice telling me I wouldn’t like it. He detested it and my mother loved it. Now I eat marmalade on my toast in the summer, when the sun is hottest. We have never gone back- after my grandfather’s death. It’s a place no longer to us, no strings attached. But in my mother, somehow, it still exists, because it’s her origin. Since, I’ve found a larger question, other than that of just my origin. Even on that trip, driving through the red rock on our way back home, I asked: “What factors create anyone’s, sense of origin?”. I knew then that origin didn’t come from only one person, or two, but rather a long chain of people linked by their decisions and their longing, their hunger. |
