L.A. POSTED: On the road home.

I'm writing this in the backseat of the car going down interstate 85 coming home from Virginia. I love technology, a cell phone, a laptop, and a USB cord and pow! You can check your myspace and get driving directions assuming you know the address of the random garage you stopped at because you're lost. I think we really added about 15 minutes to our trip home. It's whatever.

I'm glad to be going home.

My hometown has changed since I left when my mother died. I forced myself to go see my dad, to go see my old home. my mom's home. Things have changed. Her crystal collection is gone, furniture replaced, walls painted, layout changed. All hopeful and depressing thoughts that my dad had moved on. Building his own life. I was wrong. The large, ancient mirror was not above the fireplace, it was a collection of pictures of mom. Every room I walked through my mom was displayed in different times of life. Sometimes she was with me, sometimes my brother, sometime with dad. Every picture seeming to say "I'm still here". This was an entirely new feeling seeing this. I had a lump in my throat, panic. It took almost over a year for me to stop waking up and think "I need to call mom" I can deal with holidays and not be consumed by thoughts of how my mom used to decorate or make her special holiday recipes. I personally have the two pictures of my mom I have in a box, and one in a frame packed up. I rarely look at them and then two years later after avoiding my family I'm in a crude museum of my mother. It made me worry about my dad's sanity.

I asked my dad for a picture of my mom. Apparently the wrong thing to ask. His voice went up an octave "You can't have anything I have in a frame and nothing I don';t have a copy of!" I saw the look in Heather and Stephanie's eyes. You're dad's insane. He led me upstairs into what used to be my two bedrooms. The lump was back in my throat. My room was no longer mine. This house was no longer mine. Just like the ground floor, my rooms have been changed. It may not have been such a shock had my room not been turned into a complete diorama of a day in the life of my mother. Her furniture had been rearranged into little stages. Her bedroom set up the way she used to have it. Her cigarette butts still in the crystal ashtray from Germany still sat beside the bed. Her slippers by the bed. It's like she just went out for a latte instead of being dead. It was like I had just missed her. Like she had decided one day to move the house around. My actual bedroom held her clothes, the marble top living room tables in a row on one wall. The oriental rug we bought together on the way home from a trip to Virgina beach.

"I can't get rid of her things" dad says. He looks broken. His eyes only a flat blue. no sparkle. No life, "I still have her clothes. I couldn't give them away. I was afraid I would see someone else wearing them." I run my hand across a green silk cocktail dress my mom wore once and never looked at again. I cried a little bit. My back to my dad. He keeps going on his tour of memory-ville. I swallow the lump in my throat. I look at each picture in my dad's scrapbook. Each picture a sharp pain. Things I don't want to remember. I just want to be normal. Like it does not matter to me that my mother is dead. It usually doesn't, because she may be dead, but I'm still here. I am a part of her. I am the same person she was. I blink tears away as a grab a few pictures from my life with my mother. The picture of us to Barbara's her last Christmas. Chalk white and frail. A smile full of love. Eyes still full of fire. blink. blink. don't cry dumb ass.

I kept my eyes moving around each room I went in at my dad's to keep my thoughts from processing. To keep myself from running out of this house screaming. I see the Candlesticks I bought her for mother's day. I had overlooked them before. They were on the mantle. The crystal bowl to the set, no where to be found. They remind me of myself. Something my mother loved. Something my mother loved that the family forgot about. Dusty. Tarnished. Forgotten. I bring it up to my dad "Where's the bowl that goes to the candlesticks?" He didn't know. "Dad if you've lost it I'm going to be mad" He can only think that when I moved out my uncles had thrown it away. Out of sight out of mind. some family. This is the reason I moved out with very little to my name. My uncles were busy erasing my very existence. If it wasn't for me moving out, my mother would still be alive. She would've kept hanging on. She would have been miserable. These thoughts make me mad. The lump is back. I need to say something. Anything. "Why don't you ever clean these? You can't tell they're silver anymore" He doesn't respond with any kind of answer.

I have to get out of here. I force my dad to take a picture with me. It's uncomfortable and posed. He put on the pretend happy face, like the other doesn't scare us a tiny bit. "I haven't shaved Alyn" he says. I think Well you haven't seen me in two years you can take a picture with me. I tell him this. I take a picture. I say goodbye. This will probably be the last time I walk through this door. This will probably be the last time I ever try to remember my life as it was. This will probably be the last time I pretend to be part of my family.