my grandmother

My grandmother was my first womb. 

Inside my mother, inside her. 

Maybe that’s why I miss her so much. 

Maybe that’s why she feels like my past, and my present, and my future. 

My grandmother is the smell of lavender, the smell of onions cooking on the stove, the smell of a musty basement laundry room, the smell of fancy.

My grandfather smelled like the earth and she smelled like the sun. 

She lives in my blood, in my genes, in the hidden parts of my mother, that I long to see. 

She lives in the waiting. The held breaths of 7. 18. 10. 

This generation of holding down, and holding back. 

We’re learning to breathe different now. 

My grandmother isn’t here like she used to be, but I can’t use “was.”

She’s here. 

Inhale. Exhale. 

No, not floating above me, no, not hanging about with wings, or waiting for me to join her on a white cloud.

I feel her in my fingertips when I get quiet.

My chest gets tight. 

I miss her so much.

It makes me happy too, to have her finally inside me, beside me.  

I’m trying to learn from her. How I can expand where her fists grew tight.

Where her life grew tight. 

I’m trying to learn how I can laugh more, you know, she had a beautiful, gasping sort of laugh, she used as a bridge between her and others. Maybe as a wall, too, sometimes. 

People are complicated. We are no one thing. 

I think that’s how we live on, in the best of circumstances. 

We hope for,

genetic alchemy,

honest reflection,

dancing happiness and in the shadows too,

what never got to come to light.

I want to uncover it all. Our history together laid bare, hands palm to palm.

It’s what we do with the missing, I think.

How we use the lights of other’s lives to light the way into our own. Find our way to others. 

To be more free. More honest. More open. More able to take risks. 

More able able to say the truth out loud. To laugh out loud. 

September 7, 1930, until today. 

Oh, her beautiful life. 

Oh, she gave me a light.