Mirrors of My Mother (4)

My life was completely shrouded in secrets and unanswered questions. Everything that was me or concerned me was hidden by a veil. My life was just a shadow and I was it's reflection.
My name is Ganesha. I'm almost of age and I was born under the monsoon. My father died in a car accident. My mother committed suicide less than a year later. I've been with my grandfather ever since. Before my mother died, she had cut contact with her father. I have asked my grandfather about this:

"Why did my mom stop talking to you?"
"I'm not sure I'm the one that should tell you."
"Well who is supposed to? She's not around to tell me."
"I guess so...I just don't want to talk about it."
"How is that fair? I want to know! I need to know."
"Sometimes we make mistakes that only the grave can quiet."
"Neither of us is in the grave."
"I'm not going to dredge up the past. Especially one where I have had to forgive myself all these years."
"Well when you get over your guilt, could you tell me?"
"This isn't a guilt you can get over. This isn't a mountain that I'm climbing. It's a galaxy that I'm still discovering and conquering everyday."
"These metaphors you are using are cryptic. What the hell could you've done? She did this to me. To us. If anyone has guilt it should be her."

Only a few people of my mother's past ever contact me. My godfather Daniel sends me stuff every year on my birthday and on Christmas. I've seen him only a handful of times. He is coming to my graduation though. I plan on asking him about my mother since he was her best friend. He'll be flying in from Virginia. I am determined to figure out who Evie was/is. Hopefully Daniel will be able to help me out.

Mirrors of My Mother (3)

One day I finally gathered the courage to confront my origins. I climbed the stairs to the eggshell blue room wherein laid the shadowy ghost of my mother's childhood. Plastic perfect dolls that once smiled too serenely and blushed a perfect pink were meticulously resting in a row on the bed. Their once perfect updo's were now matted together, tangled, and some were shorn in pageboy cuts. A few were missing arms and legs. A once fluffy teddy bear, missing an eye and both his buttons of his overalls, laid kingly in the middle of the ambiguous looking ladies. I sat down on the bed. The springs moaned their years and the entire bed felt the weight of my curiosity. I scanned this haven where my mother held her dreams, hopes, fears. I imagined her as a child sitting on her bed and staring out of her second floor window. The endless ocean of oaks and pines unfurling in front of her. I wondered how many times she thought of this place, this room that held the past that made her. I stood next to her height that was hastily measured against the back of the door. I'm almost a foot taller than the last marking which was taken when she was thirteen. The peeling wall held a few pictures of her slowly aging. She didn't ever change much though. Her pigtails were swapped out for a long thick mane that I would one day pull on as a three year old. On the mirror, stuck in between the frame was a picture of her and another surly girl. I plucked it from the side. Both girls are dressed in jeans and t shirts. Hair long, lips too red, and eyeliner reminiscent of Cleopatra. Yet I could still tell how everyone thought that my mother and I looked exactly the same. Our face structure was the same squarish shape and our black almond eyes always had people guessing what nationality we were and what thoughts we were thinking. We even held the same endless expression of indifference. I quickly turned the picture over. Me with Evie. Senior year. I needed to know this woman who had given me life and then proceeded to shatter it. How had she become who she was? Was I to repeat her perilous past? Could I escape it?

Mirrors of my Mother post 2

I grew up about as calmly and steadily as the summer wind that blew around me. I could mark the hours by how many rows a combine had done, and which way the sunflowers had their heads turned. I graduated with every child that I had gone to kindergarten with, and they all still remembered the tears I cried every day of kindergarten and the way I never answered our teachers and instead opted to stare at my stomach. They remembered and respected my quietness and absolute disdain towards any group setting or function. I guess they had accepted me as a loner, and they left me be. Eventually, even the teachers accepted my inability to answer and they too left me be.

My grandfather raised me. He was about as lonely and quiet as I was, though he had a few farm buddies that he went to coffee with at 5:30 in the morning. But he was always back to drive me to school. I guess he understood my silence as a deep mourning for the losses in my early life. He'd lost too. He'd lost his wife before I was born, and then he'd lost my mom way before she died. I guess the universe had realized we were kindred spirits as well as repetitive relatives.

Eventually though, my emotions got to me. I longed to know my parents. Who they were. Where they went, and why did they leave me? I had long since decided that my mother was to blame. She was the crux on which my life was made. She held the options and with haste she left me to grow up alone amongst cornstalks and cloud shadowed hills. Because I was an orphan, I needed answers. I needed to be able to become right with myself. I searched for answers. I expected them to be tangible delicious things that I had waited a lifetime to taste. But in the end, I was left with more questions--I was left with myself...alone.

My name is Ganesha.