Reconciliation

I remember a time before.

I remember it because I keep going back to it, like a squirrel who stored nuts for the winter; but also like a squirrel who stored nuts for the winter, it takes me a little while to find the place again. She kept me warm on the most unexpectedly cold days. She listened to the water that poured out of me on the rainy days and she listened well because she understood me. We were alike, but as much as two people joined by the word "stepmother" could be. I loved Christmas. I loved wearing the sweaters she gave me every year to wear to Christmas dinner and I remember a time before I had to go cry in the bathroom, wiping my runny nose on the sleeve of the sweater that I didn't really like that much anyway. Before arguments that don't involve me. Before arguments that do involve me. Before grief of something I lost that claims it has found itself.

What mattered in this time was that she cleaned up blood that didn't match hers when I scraped my knee. That she kept extra tampons in the bathroom for me. That the meals she made became my favourite meals. I could always have a hug when I needed it, and hot toddies cured me only when she made them. I remember this time, this time before I had a tendency to gather every bad experience I had with her into one giant garbage mass that casts a shadow over everything. Before I realized that your acceptance of the bad in a person has limits. Before I realized that surprise isn't quite the right word and wondered why I felt it. Before I had to experience another divorce in my life. My world went from the back of a penny to the whole cobblestone street in the ten years I knew her and my pocket still rattles with the change she slipped into it.

In the darkest times, when nothing seemed to join us, the one common denominator was that we both loved my father. Now, someone has turned out the lights and there is no emergency lantern. There is no common denominator. I can't even use that anymore; I cast out a tattered line and it goes slack as it slumps to the floor a few hundred feet away. I will never stop loving my father, and as long as that is true, I will never stop falling downwards into this black hole with the garbage mass looming above me. I remember a time before I understood the elusiveness of reconciliation, that sometimes you just can't go back to a time before the damage. Now, words dance on my lips and letting them loose would make me too sick, but the staccato of their feet is nauseating. That Marie Antoinette of a time, before I hated the taste of cake, before Christmas ornaments made me angry, before I learned how to unlove someone.

There is no reconciliation in unloving someone. There is no before, or after. There is just dark, before you look down and see your own light burning holes through the shadows.