09.10.19
today i was scrolling through my facebook feed when i was struck with the video of a woman whose appearance immediately struck me. i do not think i was browsing with any sort of intent to recognize. these sorts of habits are passive, distracting, and self-medicating in nature, in the same manner of a swallowing the pill of some NSAID without thinking much of it. but my brain chose to pause –– the visceral sense of familiarity demanded this –– and i had to confront the fact that this was a video of my mother.
and what was my mother doing, somehow punctuating everyones feeds? this wasn't a post that she made. this was a post that a relative of mine had made, a relative whose digital presence i had been following for some time, after a discussion we had some years ago where this distant aunt somehow sympathized with my lack of focus and total failure to declare a major in college. she had recently opened an art studio, the latest of her fleeting projects. with broken english, she would write captions accompanying new facebook or instagram stories where she showed the western world, a place i cannot imagine she anticipated being a part of, how her students painted with a serious attentiveness.
so, too, my mother was painting. somewhere in pleasanton, california, she was now a part of a studio, working alongside young girls who were probably only ten or twelve years old. i knew she had left town; this is why i, myself, had returned to my parents' place that same weekend, where i would only interact with my dad, whose idiosyncrasies are much more in tune with mine. i had no intentions to see my mother. and yet here i was, sitting in her living room, seeing her through the narrow window afforded by a phone.
i was perplexed, undeniably muted through this interaction. it pains me to admit how good she looked. at fifty years old, her skin was somehow the youngest i felt i had ever seen it. and even though she had been dyeing her hair at home for some years, the dark smoothness now draped her like the curtain of a moonlit nightfall. she was beautiful. she always had been.
i would always 'like' these posts my aunt shared, to make my quiet affirmation to the world that those who stray from the traditional path ought to be commended where possible. i know firsthand how much challenge and doubt is nearly constantly shed on behalf of others; my mother whose voice still rings clearly in memory, "and this is where our sixteen-thousand-dollar tuition payment is going? a poetry workshop? and you're okay with this?"
needless to say, i did not 'like' this post. i tried to bury it away, like all those other memories when she came back home from nights with the theater, telling us about the directors latest fascination to re-enact postmodern thought experiments, whose histories and relevance i felt never belonged to her. (they never even belonged to him! what white man brings a script of monkeys at the typewriter, bound to an eternity of the sisyphean quest to, by the power of thermodynamic chance, produce the entire contents of Hamlet, to a cast of Indian immigrants? what director abuses the stage of Bollywood for his narcissistic passions? how he must have laughed at their unexamined worship for his authority.) how she laughed when i had my adolescent existential pains.
she painted now with such grace and unexamined ease, it indeed made me question who i was at all, and what exactly i was doing.