Texas

   I had never been to Texas before I went with my mom for her treatments. We were in Houston and it was big and warm and full of mirrored office buildings. We discovered this great store called Whole Foods on our first trip there. The prepared food section was our bit of heaven and I remember one day buying a pint of mango sorbet and sharing it while we sat in the waiting room of the Dr.'s office for some test or another. Giggling. I don't remember what we were giggling about but I remember eating this hard as a rock sorbet with a spoon together and laughing.

My mother kept journals. I have gone back and read some of them. In one of her last journals she wrote about our trips to Texas. About how I had walked down the Doctor's office hallway and changed the signs on the doors to say "occupied" to make her laugh. I don't remember doing that.

I remember her complaining about me leaving the pull out bed open in the place we stayed. She wanted everything to be in order, she was dying. I wanted everything to be comfortable, my mom was dying. I put the bed away.

It must have been when we came back to that little efficiency place after they told us to go home, that she lay in the bed, her head propped up on the pillows. I lay beside her with my head on her chest my arm around her waist and cried and cried. Sometimes I would just hold her and cry and say "I'm going to miss you so much. " And she would say, "Where would I go? I'll always be right here with you. " I believed her. I really thought that when she died she would take some other form in my life. That I would feel her presence. I would have a ghost mom. But when she died all I felt was an incredible absence. It was enormous. Up until then she had been the one constant in my life. She was ever present, she was my home.

When she died, I felt as if I had been flown over China and pushed out of the plane with a parachute. Landing somewhere where I did not speak the language or know the customs. I had to start to make a life there, so I did. And time goes by. I still feel as though my life before my mom died was another life. Another world. And this foreign place has become my new home.

It was that night that we lay on her bed, me crying, her smoothing the hair on my head that I talked about all the times we went to Pizza Hut and had pizza and drank diet cokes with lemon. "Do you want to go to Pizza Hut?" she asked. No, I didn't want to go. I wanted to stay there and hold onto her.