MY OWN PERSONAL MERMAID. BELIEVE IN HER.

It was a sad time in New York City, especially on Park Avenue where I lived then.

My given name was Magritte, for daddy’s favorite artist Rene Magritte, who thought that embracing mystery was “as indispensable as snow on Christmas.” But everyone, as far back as I can remember, always called me “Mags.”

I was 8, an only child, who was impressively precocious for her age. My favorite authors were Kafka, the feminist writer Naomi Wolff and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. When I was seven, I wrote a love letter to Stephen Hawking. He wrote back saying, “Jesus, I just can’t figure you out.”

I had a room that was handmade to make me feel that magic was at all times of the night and day, a dependable, ever-ready option thanks, in part to the twinkling stars, comet trails, and cream-colored clouds that streaked across the infinite, midnight blue sky of my ceiling that was painted by my mom when she was young, healthy, and still able to do things like wave to daddy’s video camera with daffy rubber-faced merriment, like she was the very first giddy passenger on a rocket ship to the moon.

My mom had long graceful fingers, like Vladimir Horowitz. who liked to play with the little finger of his right hand slightly curled up until it needed to play a note. And that is just how she played me. At night she loved to trace the geography of my right-out-the tub bubble bath back ever so lightly like she was practicing a Chopin Etude. It was like she was in awe of her own handiwork, the structure that she had co-built with my dad.

She had two different colored eyes, one blue, one green which always made people do a silent movie double take wherever we went.

On the night that she finished my ceiling, she had me lie on my bed (as part of her official ceremony) and with an arm-sweeping, “Ta-da!” she switched off the light and the heavens began to shimmer and glow in a light show that surely would have brought Archimedes to his knees. She suddenly appeared a fairy’s inch away from me (as if she had flutter flown via the fine-spun wings which I secretly believed that she was born with) and in strictest of confidence, she whispered in my ear, “The painted sky is really an escape route, so you, my angel, can fly away should you ever have the need to escape the clutches of, say, an evil witch or anything that frightens you.”

To emphasize her most burning desire, which was for me to have as many pioneering options as possible, my wallpaper was emblazoned with the faces of famous female scientists like Emilie du Chatelet, who translated Newton’s “Principia,” and had lots of have-it-all babies along the way and Caroline Herschel who was the first woman to discover a comet.

My friends had prince-hungry Cinderella and Snow White on their walls, but I had Dorothy Hodgkin and Rosalind Franklin on mine. But most of all, I had my mom who loved to twirl madly in a rainbow skirt, fall to the ground and call herself “Autumn.”

Daddy was a slightly enigmatic, movie star handsome attorney with a deep-dimpled Cary Grant chin that I loved to lightly excavate with a feathered finger while he read The Wall Street Journal while I sat in his lap, as curled up and content as an overfed Persian cat whose fluffy invisible white tail quietly rose and fell like a lazy raja’s fan. He always smelled like the men’s cologne counter at Bloomingdales, was as crisp as the sharp-edged cuffs of his custom made monogrammed dress shirts, and had pupils that sparkled like the twelve tiny diamonds that circled the dial of his Rolex watch.

Sometimes, while hidden deep behind the citadel of a drowsy book, he would suddenly have this mournful, faraway look etched on his face as if he was watching a visible-only-to- him parade of missed opportunities pass by which was sheer speculation on my part. I had

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already begun to cultivate my writer’s inquisitive skills by then which would rescue me time and time again, as recently as today.

Although he never once spoke of it, I sensed that he longed to hurl his imaginary lasso onto the mast of any one of those floats and sail towards the romantic coda of a brilliant sunset. His work world always felt dark and threatening to me because it frequently made him suddenly disappear from our daily lives, often for long periods of time.

One second he’d be there and then poof, just like that, his scheming shoes and conspiratorial suits would simply vanish without a trace.

Each time this happened, I was convinced that foul play was involved and I would torment myself by playing out the same, vivid scenario in my head of having to go down to the police station with my poor fitful mom to solemnly file a missing person report to the seen it all desk sergeant who was far too professional to tell us the truth: that I would never see my daddy alive again.

And then, completely out of nowhere, Daddy would suddenly re-appear with the flourish of a grand wizard and before I could burst into tears or summon the hurt walls of my own personal, defense system, I would be instantly seduced by the sheer effort and charm of his flamboyant, just for me, “Presto-Change-o” reappearance and that was all that I needed to fall into his arms and adore him again.

His peace offering was always yet another snow globe for my alarmingly expanding collection which felt like a row of purple hearts that were awarded to me for all the self-inflicted wounds that I suffered on the war-ravaged fields of abandonment.
Daddy would continue his campaign to win me over with one of his next, out of leftfield, projects. And what girl does not want to be won over, especially by their dad?

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One day, within minutes of yet another abrupt re-entry into my atmosphere, he declared that I simply had to have a bay window in my room because everything that happened on the streets of New York was a movie that was not to be missed.

Right after my own personal windows had been installed, the following exchange between my father and I became an instant sacred ritual between us. Daddy would ask me: “What are your favorite movies, Princess? And I would reply: “Every day.”

Right on the heartbeat.

We continued to casually lob that routine back and forth like a badminton shuttlecock at family gatherings and at the end of every, no-matter-how-brief phone call.

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Sometimes, when I was away at Brown or when I lived out in California and just missed him...so....so much, while I was sitting say, in an actual movie theater or stuck in L.A. traffic, I would quietly play both parts. And for a brief second, it worked. I asked. He answered.

It was really just my way of saying, I love you, daddy.

I remember thinking back then how amazingly pink and perfect my life was.

It honestly never once occurred to this little pearl of a girl (like our dry cleaner, the aggressively friendly Mr. Socolowski, used to call me with his thick-as-A-kielbasa Polish accent) that anything could possibly penetrate the island of my Manhattan-based, concrete reinforced paradise.

That of course, is the tragic folly of the privileged child.

You’re simply too insulated, too self-involved, and far too dazzled by the heady scent of your own inebriating bliss to be able to even grasp the concept that in one sudden, nuclear flash, in one tiny electrical impulse of a second, somewhere between a panicked heartbeat and a suddenly suffocated breath, everything, everything could be wiped out.

Forever.

Looking back at my own personal tragedy makes me think of the images of the day that President Kennedy was shot.

One minute he was as beautiful and as flawless as that cloudless Gatorade blue sky, smoothing down his perfect, impervious-to-the-wind pompadour, waving to the crane-necked, photo-snapping, horn-rimmed crowd, ever the invincible, conquering hero, with his trusty, perfectly radiant princess and her pink, pillbox crown at his side in the backseat of their smooth sailing wide open chariot and then in a blink, everyone was left staggered, rudderless, but worst of all orphaned.

My life was no different on the day that everything changed. I had unknowingly been locked in a different but no less deadly kind of telescopic sight and with one clean kill shot, my childhood, as I knew it, was assassinated too.
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The news that was delivered by my already grieving daddy, was that my young, vibrant, enchanted mommy, who loved to skip hand-in-hand with me down Sixth Avenue en route to see the Christmas show at Radio City or chase me through the mountains of Sycamore and Sassafras leaves in Sheep Meadow was going to die.

Soon.

Really, really soon.

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The first thing that I thought of was her skin, which was always as warm as a fresh baked red velvet cupcake, suddenly turning as cold as the solitary, frostbit metal swings of an atrophied, snow buried February playground.

I envisioned her looking up at me as she inhaled the heady citrus scent of a bright yellow lemon in the produce section of D’Agostino’s and then suddenly vanishing without saying a word.

And then I pictured her reading Le Petite Prince to me as she kissed my head and read the words “C'est un endroit mysté rieux, le land de larmes,” which, translated, means, “ It is such a mysterious place, the land of tears.” And then she disappeared without even saying au revoir, leaving nothing in her wake but the desolate, dust-filled death ray of a
nighttime lamplight.

But in both panic-fueled fantasy visions, just as she reached the epiphany of her sacred transparency, she would kneel down to me, as she always would right before she would head out the door without me and say:

I will be back.

Because mommies always come back.

And she would return to me in the morning, visible once again, at the foot of my bed, dancing in the dimension of sunlight, always barefoot, always eager, always true to her word.

I secretly hoped or needed desperately to believe, that there was some kind of formal contract that all parents had to sign on the day that you were born that would keep you tethered to them forever. Whether it actually existed or not, what I did not know was that there was an out clause and it was called cancer.

They say that dogs can smell cancer in people and I think children can too. I remember early on when she would suddenly leave a room, no matter how casual or official her exit, I would keep watching her until she disappeared. And when I could no longer see or hear her, it felt so overwhelmingly permanent that I would panic and race after her and THROW my arms around her with a tight vice grip and bury my face in her stomach, refusing to let go. And it was during those moments that I tried to inhale her cancer.

Beneath the floral-scented notes of her Annick Goutal’s Eau d’Hadrien perfume and the invisible veneer of her body cream, she smelled like long-expired milk. And that, on the

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most primitive of levels, is perhaps the one and only odor that a mother can produce that will repel a child and I was no exception.

From that point on, I held my breath whenever I was in close proximity to her. I guess it was my way of adapting to it, rather than issuing any kind of formal concession.

All of my other senses were on high alert. Way too many behind-suspiciously-closed- bedroom- door summit meetings were being held with alarming regularity, where at least a few times I heard the muffled sound of my daddy crying.

I had only seen him cry once and the deeply grieving little boy sound of it was so upsetting that it quickly became my go-to weapon of choice whenever I felt the urge to destroy myself when things were going, in my own personal estimation, inappropriately right. Grown-up delivered truth, the dreaded, unanimous verdict which can take away everything, arrived on the day that daddy and I had “the talk.”

A snake like a boa or a python kills its prey by suffocation. It uses the momentum of its strike to throw coils around its victim’s body and then literally begins to squeeze the life out of you.

Every time the prey exhales, the snake squeezes a little more tightly until the victim can’t breathe anymore and I was slowly asphyxiated in the exact same way, in the strangulating cadence of words like “metastasized,” “out of options” and “fatal.”

I remember thinking: this is the language of the dead that we have to speak now.

I just couldn’t translate anything that Daddy was saying into the simple vocabulary that is the native tongue of children. Nothing was right. Pieces no longer fit. Daddy wasn’t even daddy. He was more like the notifying officer and I was the next of kin who was being prematurely informed, in an appropriately dignified and understanding manner, that my beloved mother had been savagely mutilated by the bullets of disease and was about to officially be declared killed in action.

He might as well have said, “The United States offers you our deepest regrets. I’m sorry. There is nothing more that can be done. It’s over.”

He allowed me to express my feelings which at that point had gathered like an angry mob to protect and defend the homeland of my heart.

I remember screaming: How could she do this to me? Why would she do this to us?

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Those are the questions, you quickly learn, which God winds up sending back to you in an avalanche of unopened envelopes.

As my world began to spin faster and faster on its now hobbled and trembling axis, I had no choice but to leave the earth. Suddenly, like Le Petite Prince I found myself perched on my barren planet looking mournfully for any sign of hope in the vast unknown.

Her diagnosis hadn’t given us enough time to shelter ourselves, let alone her, from the crushing force of the raging pancreatic cyclone.

I could not border up her bedroom and hunker down with hopeful songs and prayers until it passed.

I could not protect her.
My mommy was vanishing.
She began to wither and decay like she was following instructions.

Her skin and the whites of her eyes turned as yellow as the lemons that she loved to inhale. Instead of aging her rapidly, the illness made her look perversely younger until all that remained was a skeletal infant swaddled and curved on a king-sized bed.

Her usual soundtrack (all people come with them) which up till now, had been a spirited, Snow White-like melody which she unconsciously hummed while she washed the dishes or painted her toenails, (while a few invisible chirping bluebirds flew overhead) was wiped out, replaced by the wheezing mechanical requiem of her panicking lungs and the barely audible whimper of slow surrender.

Denying the existence of my adversary or wishing for a miracle was obviously not going to get me anywhere. Her condition was a clear call for immediate action, so I whittled it all down and quickly came up with two practical solutions. I either had to find some way to go back in time in order to alter history or I had to figure out a way to alter the current course of human events. I chose the latter and turned to the one person who I knew was capable of delivering the goods.

I had always secretly believed that in the event of an emergency, I was capable of directly reaching Handsome Jesus which is what I called him then because, well, look at him. Am I right, ladies?

The problem was time. Whenever I closed my eyes I kept seeing the face of the Wicked Witch of the West and her rapidly draining hourglass.

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The sand was now my mortal enemy.

At one stage of my ongoing negotiations with Handsome Jesus, I offered up a soul swap deal: a mine for hers scenario. It was obvious, from the massive, static infused silence that came transmitting back from the great beyond, that I was either not reaching him or worse: this was a non-negotiable situation. So I did what I always did. I pitched a fit.

The art of catastrophe, after all, is the built-in specialty of 8-year-old girls.

At that age, when things go even marginally wrong, you tend to fall apart like Cassandra on a very bad day and act out big time.

But this was no emotionally charged performance. No outsized tantrum.

I was bombarded by feelings that were hotter than the switched on burners of the kitchen stove that I was taught never to touch. And yet both my hands were suddenly glued to them and I couldn’t get then off no matter how hard I tried. The more that I howled in pain, the more no one heard me.

The rest of the time was spent feeling enraged at both God and Handsome Jesus. Their lack of response felt so personal and vindictive that it brought me to the stunning conclusion that I might somehow be responsible for all of this.

I began brutally interrogating myself.
What had I done to deserve such an unimaginably cruel fate?

Had my true nature been found out? Had I done something so thoughtless or worse, deliberate that was so unimaginably cruel that it was judged unforgivable? Who had I wronged? Who had I hurt or offended?

I ransacked through the memory drawers of my brain, trying to remember that one, single specific or inciting incident that might have been the root cause of this unbearable havoc. But I could not come up with a thing.

Exhausted and depleted, it was decided by the inner council of me that perhaps it would be best if I launched myself into the muted expanse of space, where the pain was an unreachable transmission and my one-woman mission would be to watch from a safe distance the final war maneuvers of tragic sadness.

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From high above the exosphere of grief, I remember catching glimpses of my daddy floating up and down the hallway in his gravity-defying socks, looking like that famous Munch painting that the German’s called “Der Schrei der Natur.” The scream of nature.
He could barely tolerate a yes or no question before he would retreat back into the ether hut of his outsized grief.

Mommy floated in the air, prostrate, somewhere between heaven and her death bed mattress in the dark, life-draining room which was littered with medical detritus and gasping machines.

My visits with her were initially frequent. I would often curl up next to her, listening to the modulation of her faint, syncopated breaths which was the only music that I desperately needed to hear. I remember outlining the geography of her long body, exploring the vast, velvety epidermal frontier of her arms, her legs with my finger, just like her nightly inventory of me so many times before.

But I was doing something different: I was memorizing her. So I could re-draw her on the papers of my journal or on the smooth, stretched white canvas of my imagination when she was no longer here.

The room felt like the shades were always drawn, even when they were partially or even wide open. Shadows drifted in and out like hushed missionaries.

The hospice nurse, Anna, a defiantly robust woman with a faint, impossible to decipher Mona Lisa-like smile and eyes as blue as Lake Como (which once enchanted Flaubert and Verdi) arrived at our doorstep one day, with suitcase in hand, just like Max Von Sydow in “The Exorcist.”

She was at once, a soothing and threatening presence.

On one side, her radiant, angel of mercy confidence and near acrobatic skill at everything medical made it feel like she had brought with her a powerful, top-secret, miracle-inducing, just-for-us cure that defied conventional medicine. But at the same time, she felt like a professional, assassin who was trained in the art of goodbye which more often than not, made her presence unbearable.

I sensed that she came with a kind of built-in knowledge and knew exactly when it was going to happen. I remember staring at her, trying to break the code of her face, hoping that her eyes might drop their professional guard and reveal some crucial bits of information. But it was my mom’s sallow, quickly evaporating body that told the tale. After lingering in a coma for what felt like decades, one day her eyes suddenly snapped open like the world had just yelled “surprise!” She looked at me...saw me...I mean she really, really saw me...smiled and said my name like it was made of sugar.

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And then she fell back onto the bow of the invisible sloop whose billowing, wind-stoked headsails were slowly navigating her somewhere far beyond the magnetic pull of any compass’s true north, a million light years past Thuban and Polaris, towards the outermost reaches of the unattainable sky.

I remember lying on my bed as I sensed the armies of my resolve begin to disobey my orders as they one by one began to lay down their spears and shields on the battlefield of oncogenesis and just as my inner general was ready to start drafting my speech of unconditional surrender, suddenly, for reasons I still cannot explain, I stood up, stepped onto a pile of hastily stacked pillows on my bed. I assumed the closed first position and then began leaping towards the ceiling, attempting one last-ditch “echappe sur le pointes/demi-pointes” to do what I should have done from day one: fly away.

But I could not achieve lift-off no matter how hard I tried.
It was like gravity had gripped me by the ankles, refusing my launch request.

Being grounded like that filled me with so much contempt and rage that I started lashing out, spewing obscenities, the few that I knew, until I was exhausted.

Finally, with eyes clamped shut I slowly stretched my limp, useless arms up towards the ceiling hoping that by sheer will, I might be granted the last-minute gift of elasticity.

I envisioned the tips of fingers reaching the galaxy MACS0647, a mere 13.3 billion light-years away, where infinity was the only option.

My thought was if I could get there first, I could catch my mom before she could go any further. Then I could fly her home, in my arms, propelled by the sheer velocity of incandescent stardust while whispering into her ear that she was my darling too.
But my feet never left the earth of my bed and now I knew why.

My custom-designed, escape-route-from-evil sky had been permanently shut down because my entire universe required one crucial kick start ingredient: the pure, radiant, splendor energy of my mom. As far as I knew, she hadn’t left any detailed operating or maintenance manual behind, so just like that my ceiling became just another ceiling.

I began to experience an altered state of being, as I transformed myself into my own version of St. Francis as I watched the blood of my stigmata begin to escape from my body. But instead of being overwhelmed by the thrilling ecstasy that comes from the intoxication of sanctity, all that I felt was the suffering of the messiah. Clearly, there was to be no Holy Communion.

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I remember throwing open my windows, laying myself back onto my bed, shutting my eyes, crossing my hands at the chest, holding my imaginary rosaries tightly, pretending to be a beautiful corpse, just like Juliet at the end of the play.

I held my breath for as long as I could, daring my heart to stop, as the wind bullied its way through the twisted drape skirt of my lacy lady curtains. This death bed simulation was inspired by the thought that if I could no longer feel her life, then I was damn well going to feel her death. From that day on, the round the clock feature presentation that played on the triptych screens of my bay window was the story of hardship, endurance, and the suffocating solitude of winter.

The only break that we got was when we would get one of those totally out of nowhere, unseasonably warm days, which to me felt like a sneak preview of the empty days to come which featured either an intolerable splay of sunshine or a startling burst of rain whose droplets splattered across the windows like sudden heartbreak.

I remember watching them land and mutate, in utter fascination, touching them through the glass, thinking that if each raindrop landed on a piano key, they would play Chopin’s Nocturne No. 1 in B Flat Minor which was the music that my ballet teacher, Madame Gregg, always played when she would angrily smack her hands together and bark instructions at us from behind that Halloween mask of sneering contempt of hers as she demanded that we embrace our inner ballerinas.

We all tried to appear graceful in the cold, cracked window leaky gulag of her Upper West Side studio that always smelled like daddy’s sweat-drenched tee shirt right after a furiously contested racket ball game. But the truth was no one felt beautiful. We all felt ugly, spastic, and hopeless as if we were being punished for the sin of being exactly who we were.

Time seemed excruciatingly slow. Like there were a hundred years between tick and tock. Time has a very specific personality. It is willful. Contrary. A self-determined, marching life force that, while it directly affects every single cell of your being, wants absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with you, personally.

It basically does whatever the hell it wants, whether you like it or not.

That is never more clear than when time is running out on the person who you love the most.

I don’t remember when time abandoned our house. But it most definitely did. Abruptly and without notice.

I think it slipped out the front door around the time that mommy could no longer walk on her own and daddy stopped going to work or out into the world for his Sunday morning/pajama bottom and puffy jacked/ bagel-and-New-York-Times safari.

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With time officially out of the picture, we were left in a state of perpetual in vacuo, where screams don’t travel and light slowly cedes to darkness, which I deeply resented because falling asleep meant that I was abandoning my post, which during wartime, is an act of supreme cowardice, punishable by death.

Despite my gallant efforts, once I had succumbed, the only thing that would wake me up were not the nightmares.

Those felt justified and familiar.

What woke me up were the happy dreams, where mommy would suddenly appear as vibrant and alive as a ukulele strumming jazz flapper all boozed up on life.

She would slap her thighs and laugh and laugh and laugh.

And all I could do was hold out my arms and cry and cry and cry.

Long after the thick fog of after-midnight stillness would roll in, the only thing that I would hear was the sound of the insistent pendulum which, rather than measure time, swung like the sword of Damocles inside the antique grandfather clock that stood like the sentry of death in the main foyer.

It was like its sole purpose was to make sure that few got in and no one got out.
Even worse was school, which I floated through as if gravity had no more use for me.
The unwritten, yet assiduously followed private school rule was that the word cancer was never to be said out loud by anyone. It was like this massive scarlet letter ‘C” had been crudely hand-sewn across the chest of my kick pleated school uniform.

I felt exiled by circumstance. Jane Eyre cloaked in repudiation and invisibility.
Back home, the dogs, our matching Irish Setters, Franny, and Zooey, knew exactly what was going on.

Tails became wag-less. Stilled metronomes.

Ears were lowered at half-mast. Eyes were filled with dog sorrow.
Our entire existence was as unbalanced and messy as the stack of gravy blotched dishes that were piled precariously high in the sink and the hastily erected, Tetris sculpture of pizza boxes and Chinese take-out cartons that teetered in the sullied corner of the kitchen. I felt like I was strapped helplessly in the back seat of my parents’ car during one of those endless car trips where daddy has gotten us lost and all I can ask was:

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Are we there yet?

Are we there yet?

Daddy?

Are we there?

Language soon became irrelevant, which made perfect sense, because what was there left to say?

Next to go was mommy’s music, which up until that point, had been an endless loop of Jackson Browne and Joni Mitchell songs that eventually became the only tangible evidence of her existence.

As long as there was music, there was her.

I remember lying on the couch, listening really, really hard to those songs, trying with all my might, to tap into her frequency, which, I believed held all kinds of hidden messages meant only for me. But before I could decipher it, suddenly the soundtrack disappeared, just like her humming had, replaced by the endless loop requiem of Beethoven string quartets which wept from the moors of Manhattan like a grieving widow.

I began to toy with the conclusion that, since my ceiling no longer offered me a getaway route, perhaps leaping headfirst out the window or allowing myself to be voluntarily pushed out by the hovering spirits of constant sorrow, was a potentially viable solution. My logic was, if God meant me to fly, I would fly and if I plummeted to the ground then it was simply time for me to go.

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Luckily my poorly thought out flight plan was mercifully aborted when I was rescued; literally brought back to earth by the sudden, unannounced arrival of my Aunt Claire who was my mom’s younger sister. Where my mom was genetically flawless and always on the verge of extemporaneous joy, Aunt Claire was anthropologically challenged. Her hair was baffled, her nose looked like an uncooked dinner roll and her unibrow made you think that maybe Darwin was on to something.

Despite her astonishing shortcomings and having survived the torment of having been called “Claire De Loon” all through high school, Aunt Claire was a rather positive, upbeat, and relentlessly playful person. She just had to work at it perhaps a little bit harder than most, overcompensating for her severe lack of natural grace just like I did in ballet class.

But I think, unlike most of us, she secretly knew the precise location of where her true beauty lived.

When she arrived that day, I was beyond delighted because finally, the persistent ringing of our doorbell was not heralding the presence of the grim-faced pizza delivery guy whose unfortunate skin resembled the very thing that he was transporting.

But it was much more than that. Her completely unexpected cameo appearance in the theater of my bedroom, in her reluctant coat and defiantly mismatched Bergdorf - Goodman scarf could only mean one thing: 

I was getting out.

And just like that, my everyday countenance returned. I could walk erect again, with my head, however provisionally, back in the clouds where it rightfully belonged.

Aunt Claire was just the tonic that I needed to be reminded, for a few brief, shining hours anyway, that I was equal parts cherished and alive.

When she announced that we were going to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which to this day is still my most favorite place on earth, normally I would have exploded into circus confetti.

But instead, much to my surprise, the complete opposite happened. 

I didn’t react at all.

Instead I went completely mute because frankly hearing  language again was so startling that I practically fainted from the thrill of it.

But more to the point, kindness, dispensed like this, as casually as pretzel samples at the mall, felt so foreign and confusing to me that I suddenly found myself beginning to distrust the entire operation.

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Plus, in the event that something went tragically wrong in my absence, was leaving my post not only wildly inappropriate but something I could be court-marshaled for or worse, deeply regret for the rest of my life?

Aunt Claire, sensing my apprehension, deftly capped my shuddering wellhead by assuring me with absolute certainty that all would be well, and then she lured me in with the irresistible news that a huge, just-for-kids exhibit was opening that very day called: “Fantasy And Fairy Tales In Art.”

I don’t even remember bolting out the door.

Making your entrance into the heart of the city at lunchtime, especially when it’s been a while, is like leaping headfirst into the main tent of a three-ring circus.
Everywhere you look you are surrounded by shopping bag jugglers, city working acrobats, prancing show dogs and all kinds of clown-like characters with wild hairdos and flamboyant costumes. Even its whistleblowing, madly honking, siren shrieking car and truck symphony sounds just like a swirling, carefree calliope.

I felt like I was plugged directly into the main power grid of the city and I could feel its sizzling electricity surge through every single neuron of my body. I needed Dr. Frankenstein to scream, “She’s Alive! Alive I tell you! Alive!” as bolts of lightning crackled across the sky.

A mere five or ten minutes into my journey, my head was spinning like the green-domed carousel at the Jardin du Luxembourg which mommy told me came alive every night after midnight all by itself.

Before I knew it, I was sailing through the halls of the museum, aboard my very own, personal invincible galleon of unfettered delight.

These were hardly uncharted waters.

The fact is I knew the museum far better than I knew the layout of my own apartment, so I never needed directions. This was my turf and by the time I was two or three, I would spend half my time there guiding mystified people to their exhibit destinations, which often included the newer, fresh-faced navigation-challenged museum workers who were trying desperately trying to not be lost.

What I loved most about the museum was how it spoke to me like a story read by mommy. Nothing about it felt the least bit scholarly or antiseptic. I had long ago come to the conclusion that I most definitely had enjoyed several past lives as I never felt more relaxed

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then when I lingered amongst the art and artifacts of the Roman, Greek, and Byzantine exhibits.

And yet, strangely enough, I felt equally welcomed by the Stieglitz and Evans photographs and the Rembrandt paintings as well.

I swear to God his self-portrait always winked at me when no one was looking.
It was clear to me that, just like mommy, I was a restless spirit who required several civilizations over a period of many thousands of years, to find a place that I could finally call home.

Perhaps because of what I was going through at the time, nothing seemed to engage me fully. While being in close contact with all that was familiar to me was most comforting (if for the one fact alone that unlike mommy, everything that I loved would be here, forever) Although I didn’t know it at the time, I craved some kind of deep and profound crescendo that I could tuck into the backpack of my soul and carry its precious cargo home with me for safekeeping.

After a few hours of relentless exploring, with time out for a most civilized and agreeable lunch in the all grown-up private dining room, whose views of the park, with its stark vibrancy, I have to admit hurt my heart, just as I was beginning to draft my heartbreaking concession speech and admit defeat, that is when I saw her.

The mermaid.

She was the grand centerpiece of the fairy tale exhibit, which in this case, was a magical sea creature-filled, oxygen-bubbling, deep-blue, aquatic wonderland. She came packed with a wallop for which I was totally unprepared. It was like getting hit square in the face with a Louisville Slugger made out of glitter that filled my lungs and accelerated my heart with such a rush of excitement that I knew at the moment that I was falling in love for the very first time.

It felt like my limbs were made of pulled saltwater taffy and the room began spinning like the aforementioned merry-go-round.

Aunt Claire, who had been taking my emotional temperature ever since we left, as efficiently as mommy’s round the clock nurse Anna. misdiagnosed my sudden state of euphoria as a form of emotional exhaustion or disintegration brought about by the sudden bombardment of stimulation and uncontainable excitement. She knelt down attentively and quietly whispered the six single worst words that no child ever wants to hear from the lips of an adult. She said:

I think it’s time to go.

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I went from zero to devastated in under a second. I tried halfheartedly to fuel the fires of my generators with random coals of adrenalin, but the truth was I had in truth, been running on reserve. And just like all the other regulars of the Central Park playground community knows, when skylight faded, so were your chances of negotiating even five more minutes of freedom.

But an actual, real-life mermaid was sitting just inches from me, and being denied this once in a lifetime meet and greet with her was just too much to bear.
For the past few months, everything that was precious to me had been wrenched out of my hands. But not this time. No way. No how.

And just like, that my most feral survival instincts took over. I coiled my deadly claws, flashed my fangs and growled from my gut like a wildebeest.
Right before things were about to turn very, very ugly, that was the precise moment that I caught the mermaid’s eye and she caught mine. She smiled right at me as if I was the only person in the room and it was breathtakingly magical.

It was like every single grown-up and handheld child, right on cue, retreated into the shadows, just like the Jets and the Sharks did when Tony and Maria saw each other for the first time in the West Side Story gym, and now, all that was left on God’s green earth was my own, personal mermaid and me.

In one powerful, impossible to measure the moment of pure recognition, we were connected as if we had been desperately searching for each other for our entire lives. The heady rush of joy that I felt in that moment was even greater than the kind of bliss that comes right after you blow out your birthday cake candles or when you rip open your largest Christmas gift or when your mom or dad simply say, “good job.”

After all those endless months of crying, my emotional rations were so low that I was convinced that I could no longer produce tears. But to my surprise, they returned like a flash flood. The drought was finally over and I wept from the ache of ecstasy.
Suddenly, I was airborne and flying right towards her.

I floated across the room just like my mom used to on any given night when she would silently soar from door frame to the side of my bed in order to airdrop a thousand and one fairy-light kisses on my cheeks and brow. I landed perfectly at the mermaid’s side and instantly became her most trusted confidant and sidekick. She looked down and smiled at me as if the first thing she was going to say was, “welcome home”
.
I could tell instantly that she was a mermaid of the first order, the kind that I had been searching for, for my entire life that despite my tireless efforts I was never able to find. Until now.

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Her hair was made of waist-length finely spun gold, her arms were long and ballerina slender, her eyes looked like they had been ordered from a catalog for perfect jade green irises, her delicate chest was held together with matching pink seashells and her slowly fanning turquoise fins set off a million sparkles of brilliant light.

I mirrored her hand to knee pose perfectly.

We sat there like a pair of perfectly matched porcelain bookends for what seemed like hours of exquisite forever, admiring each other’s repose, silently celebrating our newfound bond and exclusive life-long friendship to come.

Suddenly, a look of genuine concern appeared across her face, and in one fluid motion, she bent down towards me and studied my face, just like I did when I tried to memorize Renoir’s “Bal du Moulin de la Galette.” Her hand unexpectedly retracted, fluttering back up to her cheek, every finger a tiny, excitable, returning dove, as she drew in a tiny gasp of recognition as if her intuitive mermaid heart had just told her everything about my mom.

I could see my myself, all lit up wading in the deep pools of her eyes. I felt like I could float in there forever. Then, without asking me a thing, she gently stroked my hair like I was her favorite lamb and said with absolute certainty:
“There is always beauty.”

And then she kissed me on my cheek and her lips felt like they were made out of cashmere and fairy magic. It felt like I had just been hand-delivered a miracle cure from the waters at Lourdes. The veil of suffocating darkness had not just been lifted. I was given the gift of absolution. I had been both saved and blessed by my own perfect mermaid and in my book that was every bit as powerful as being consecrated by Handsome Jesus himself.

Being both eight and therefore, insatiable, I was hoping to get a little extra chin wag with her so we could maybe gossip a bit and compare girl/mermaid notes, but intuitively, I knew that my time to sit at the fins of enchantment was up, as all the fully dimensional sights and sounds of museum life came roaring back like a massive, rolling full moon tide.

During my trance, an endless, forever snaking fidgety conga line of antsy children had formed between a pair of uncertain red velvet ropes, and each and every one of them was ready to stage the coup that was about to topple my reigning position as mermaid best friend. I had to think fast. I turned to my own personal mermaid and cried out, “Wait! Do you have a cellphone that I can call you on?” She smiled, just as a faceless, sinewy security guard started to guide me away from her by my elbows.

I squirmed out of his grip and yelled out“ Wait! In case of an emergency, how can I reach you?” She flashed a faint, ironic mermaid smile which to me said, “Hey, I’m a huge, international celebrity. Sorry, but we don’t give out our numbers.” By this point, the

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security guard had his hands around my waist and was pulling me further and further away.

I cried out: “Where do you live??” She put up her hand to the guard and motioned to me with her finger to lean in close and as I did, her warm as the Atlantic Ocean in August lips, grazed my ear and she whispered in perfectly nuanced mermaid, “I live in the boat lake in Central Park.” I screamed, “Got it! Thanks,” as I was airlifted back to the Aunt Claire section of the museum.

I already felt like I was a million light-years away from my mermaid, who in the faraway distance was already captivating my replacement, another wild-eyed, overly eager but

hardly-as-interesting-as-me visitor girl and I felt my heart begin to sink and implode like a treasure chest of a million escaping doubloons.

But I somehow managed to rally, comforted by the thought that anyone who met me always said that I was memorable, so that offered me a glimmer of hope.

The precise location of her residence was obviously hush-hush exclusive and not to be shared with anyone so that alone was proof positive that she had singled me out as someone unique, worthy and special.

What happened immediately after that I have no memory of.

Time sometimes, especially when you are young and drowsy, seems to come with giant invisible erasers that often leave you with a temporary blank slate. I remember waking up sweat-drenched and sleep baffled, burrowed face down 20,000 leagues under the sea of Canadian feathers.

I remember going through the items of my mental checklist. Where was I? In my bed. Check. How did I get there? I had no idea. Half a check. I vaguely remembered a cab ride, my head being stroked like a kitten in Aunt Claire’s lap, watching the comet trails of fuzzy streetlights speeding by overhead, hearing the full faucet gush of traffic and the faraway drone of Middle Eastern music fleeing from a dashboard radio as the lids of my eyes slowly shut like the aperture of an old-timey camera. Click.

Was that real?
Wait. Did I actually meet my mermaid or was that a dream?

It’s so dark in here. Is it day or night? Just as I was about to cast my ballot for most creditable thought, I sat up and noticed the clearly defined shadow of my daddy sitting on the edge of my bed.

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He was crying and real-life came CLANGING at me like a freight train.

White-hot head-blood flooded my ear canals and all I could hear was the incessant pounding of my vice constricting heart. The caged, terrified animal inside me, grabbed me by the throat, threw me out of bed.

I raced, without thought or purpose, down the endless, pitch black, tunnel-vision hallway, my nerve endings on fire to her bedroom... and I stared at her empty bed.
Mommy was gone. All that was left was the shocked, pulsating afterglow of nothing. That’s when I was assaulted by all the images of her.

Hundreds, maybe thousands of home movie highlights, cheerful, commemorative scrapbook photos came at me from all sides with such urgency that it felt like military pilots were on high alert to head straight for the skies in order to protect and defend the memory of my mom.

And then every single image of her suddenly burst into flames and she began to disappear like the quickly dissolving faces of silent film actors on the unstable reels of nitrate film and in less than an eye blink, every single moment that mattered to me most was reduced to cremated ash.

I wanted to scream out: I’m only 8!! You can’t have her! Give her back! Fuck you cancer! Fuck you!

But nothing would come out of my mouth.

It was like the biggest, most important factory in town that kept all of us alive had suddenly been shut down. Forever.

But it was more than that. I was nobody now. It was like my face and identity had been surgically removed.

I remember panicking because in that moment, I couldn’t remember who I was or what love felt like.

Over the next few hours, a series of unidentified, incoming grown-up sized shadows slipped in and out of our borders like international spies sharing our most personal secrets.
Life, over the next few days, felt lifeless, without sound, without color, and most importantly without her.

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And yet I remained the dogged, impassioned resistance fighter, exhaustively combing the countryside in search for any sign of her that might have survived the scorched battleground of terminal illness.

The reality is she was easy to find because she was everywhere that I looked. She was the pale gray sweater, draped and drooping on the quiet, sunroom chair which had been instantly transformed into a statue that memorialized both her casual posture and generous,, flung wide open arms which were now conspicuously drained of both her actual arms which were, in turn, were drained of me.

Her skin lotion, whose puissant scent always trumpeted her imminent and much-anticipated arrival, barely clung to life in the molecules of her still damp bath towel, in the fibers of her stunned clothes that hung mournfully in her closet, and in the ghostly death mask impression of her head which had been sculpted and entombed in the soft white clay of her appropriately named Egyptian high threaded pillowcase
And then there was her tuna sandwich.

It sat perched and waiting, like a pet with a leash in its mouth, atop her favorite sun glow yellow lunch plate on the top shelf of the refrigerator. Even over these last few weeks, when she was disappearing like a pertinacious magic trick, she still had the will and the creative ability to cleverly manipulate all the atoms of her universe, as all true artists can, in order to extract the most out of life by turning whatever she touched into art.

Even the usually anonymous garnish that sat on the side of the plate, was like a tiny fashion statement: a rakish hat tilted and arranged just so, for maximum effect.
My mom was on that plate and just like me, that sandwich was waiting for her to come back, lift me up and devour me.

So it was officially granted a pardon by me and immediately became a kind of canned fish-based shrine, proof positive that beyond a shadow of a doubt, anyone can stay alive for as long as they want even in the form of a humble Bumble Bee tuna salad sandwich on multi-grain bread.

Because all the final grown-up plans had been meticulously thought out, privately discussed, and mutually agreed upon well in advance, everything moved with surprising speed and efficiency. I was simply on the moving sidewalk of grief and just let it carry me off to whatever direction it thought best.

There was a sad coffin funeral, with a slow-moving parade of sad-eyed adults who all looked like grief-stricken children dressed up for the worst Halloween ever, who all told vibrant stories about their time spent with mom which were meant to be comforting, healing and funny and people laughed even while they cried.

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That was followed by the brief blur of a ceremony where my mom’s ashes and probably her restless spirit as well, were set free in a favorite spot along the banks of the Hudson River. The rain-swollen clouds, like those of us who had assembled along the river, were unable to hold anything back, and showered us with their rain tears, while a phone line of perfectly arranged, crows solemnly observed the proceedings as if they had flown in specifically to both pay their last respects and welcome their new riverside neighbor.

The scenery of our play changed rapidly.

We must have been driven home but I honestly can’t remember a second of the journey, what was said, who drove or who was even in the car.

We were transported in what felt like outer space seconds, back to the earth of our apartment where daddy hosted the quietest party ever held in the universe. Forks tapped plates like metronomes. Coffee was sipped on the incoming tide of a whisper. People spoke in muted grown-up war time code.
A few people sobbed, especially when they looked at me. It was so quiet that I could hear our upstairs neighbor’s kids running around, laughing and screaming over the raucous sound of the Disney Channel. It was like Mickey and Pluto were dancing on mommy’s grave and all I wanted to do was run up there and punch every single one of them in the face. But the worst moment, the absolute, final blow, came when I opened the refrigerator to say a silent good night moon good night to the tuna sandwich only to discover that it was gone.

Someone had eaten it and with it they had swallowed whatever was left of my life. The holy communion plate, that I believed had been blessed by Handsome Jesus had been casually dumped into the sink, like a throat slit gangster, lumped together with all the other completely meaningless, ordinary, everyday dirty dishes. Like mommy’s ashes, its sanctified crumbs had been scattered to the wind and now the single most tangible symbol of her earthly existence was gone forever and the impact of that loss didn’t just stagger me, it instructed me, in no uncertain terms, exactly what I had no choice but to do.

When one experiences both life and death at such a tender young age, as clearly as I did on the afternoon of my own, personal tuna fish sandwich tragedy, any form of escape, no matter how implausible, seems imminently doable.

My entire exit strategy came to me in the form of a fully formed vision and I quickly reasoned that I would have to wait until midnight to put my plan into motion because (A) it would be the same deadline as Cinderella’s single glass-slipper-getaway and (B) it was the time that my dad would have finally succumbed to the siren’s song of pharmaceutical sedation.

Before I knew it, it was time.

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I hadn’t slept a wink, having spent the entire night, fine-tuning the details of my elaborate escape.

It never even occurred to me to put on a proper coat because when you find yourself in the throes of a self-induced hypnotic trance, the rules of common sense simply no longer apply. I did, however, perhaps intuitively, chose to wear my Wendy onesie because she was, after all, the ultimate surrogate-mother symbol of both Never Land and me.

Just knowing that her welcoming face would be emblazoned across my chest comforted and empowered me. I chose my battery-powered sneakers as my mode of transportation mainly because Velcro straps were easier to fasten in the dark, plus their tiny toe-blinking lights would provide me with an on-again/off again illuminated runway that would act as my personal guide as I trekked my way blindly through the massive, jagged nighttime mountain range of living room furniture.

The scariest part was getting past the night shadow beast that had splayed its long hairy legs across our entire apartment like a giant heavy breathing tarantula.

After what felt like hours, I stealthily negotiated my way through the valley of the upholstered terrain, made it to the final frontier of the foyer, reached the front door, and out I went into directly into the hushed night-black heart of darkness heart of Manhattan.
I had never walked through the streets of New York by myself, by day or especially at night and the minute that my feet hit front door concrete, I took off as if a starter’s pistol had just been fired.

In my mind, I was running the Olympic marathon race of my life and all I could hear was the wild pounding of my jungle drum heart and the hard galloping of my sneaker-hoofs whose rhythmic, street slapping sound ricocheted like a super ball off the buildings of the grand concrete and glass canyon as I was cheered on by the roar of an imagined, frenzied crowd.

Somewhere behind me, in the incalculable, quickly disappearing distance was the ambient city soundtrack whose street musicians included the occasional syncopated traffic light and lone wolf taxi that sloshed its way through the empty street and avenue sea.

But none of that distracted me.

I was on a final mission and nothing was going to derail my focus or get in my way, except perhaps, my most primitive fears which were suddenly starting to bellow from my gut, and paralyze me in my tracks the second that I reached the outer lip of Central Park.
By day the park was my very own personal sunlit endorsed playground paradise. But seeing it at night was like seeing it without its clothes on and I was literally shocked by the stark, grown up nakedness of it all. Even worse, it emitted this menacing sound, which was

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like the ravenous, churning stomach juices of a predator that was salivating at the enticing scent of my child age flesh.

I sensed the presence of rabid, razor-toothed quadrupeds who in my mind were perched on the shoulders of my usually kid-friendly branches, that now resembled the wretched, half-eaten arms of arthritic witches whose sole after-hours purpose was to scrape up and devour the small and the innocent.

My heart drums were now beating at war pitch level.

I quickly evaluated the situation and ran through my few options. As far as I knew I had maybe a snow-dusting of magic left in me plus and in the event of a dire emergency, surely Handsome Jesus would be on call and would therefore have my back.
I held my breath, puffed up my little girl chest out until my lungs felt like matching protective air-bags and I took the plunge, RUNNING right into the night bowels of the park, with clamped- shut eyes and I kept running on all cylinders until I was standing at the precise point that I had set out to reach: The boat lake, where my own personal mermaid lived.

This was the forwarding address that she had whispered in confidence to me at the museum and not striking me as any kind of con artist., there was absolutely no reason not to believe her.

I knew that this was the one and only spot on earth that I could go to when I was ready, to leave this wretched, hideous world so that I could reclaim the deepest, most important part of me which had been ripped right out of my hands like a Rosebud sled, the second that my mom died.

As far as I was concerned, I was simply taking back what was rightfully mine. Plus I could back it all up with logic.. Fact: I was not made for a motherless world. Fact: Like Mary and her obsessive little lamb, wherever my mom went, I was sure to go. Fact: I no longer took her sudden departure as a violation of our agreement that she would always come back. My logic was, she was most probably just momentarily distracted, in this case by death, just like when she was on the phone. Only this time, rather than have to wait patiently for her to hang up, it was time for me to take the initiative and make myself heard, loud and clear. I had been quickly roared through all the Kubler-Ross stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and now it was time for the very last step: spiritual contact.

So there I stood, on this damp, silent late March night, staring at the lake that was the secret exclusive real estate of my own personal mermaid.

A clearing in a forest by the ruins of a chapel. A moonlit night.

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IsuddenlylaughedoutloudwhenIthoughtabouthownaıv̈ eIhadbeen.Imeansomany other civilian children like myself had sailed their toy boats along the banks of this very lake hundreds of times.

And yet no one, including me, had any idea what was really going on down there, far below the surface.

I imagined that once I was properly settled in down there, during the warmer months I would be able to look up and watch the bottoms of all those tiny vessels skim aimlessly by, tickled by the knowledge that things that are often thought of as shallow, like people and park ponds, just may have all kinds of surprising depths to them.

It was time.

Time to say goodbye to this now meaningless life that had denied me my rightful fairy tale ending. I always knew that I didn’t belong here. That I was not a girl of either the present or the future. The museum had long ago taught me that. No, I was a girl who belonged to the parallel dimension of salvation and make-believe, whose collective universe, once entered, would confirm what I had always known: that illusion was as real as the reflection of the lake that now sang my name like a seductive ancient sea chantey.

I quietly kicked off my sneakers and stood up on tiptoes on the edge of the pond like I was standing on the duvet tarmac of my bed, preparing for liftoff.

Looking down I could see myself surrounded by all the sparkling lights that swirled around me like a corps du ballet of lightning bugs, while Wendy beamed from my tee-shirt, as if she were tacitly approbating my most perfect end of life decision. I closed my eyes, thanked my daddy for being my daddy, boldly threw up my arms like a just landed Olympic gymnast, held my breath just like I did when I was about to get a flu shot, and fell in.

As I began to sink I was bombarded with visions; a skillfully edited highlight reel that featured the best moments of my life, that insulated me from the ice-cold water just like my way too big winter parka or like daddy’s warm as toast, enveloping arms.

I guess this is as good a moment as any to mention that I could not swim.

In my own defense, let me say that I believed at the time, as any child does, that I could do whatever anyone could do by sheer will and without an ounce of training, All I had to do was activate my pretend switch, and boom: I was an expert in anything.

So it was rather startling to me when I continued to sink like a rock towards the bottom of the lake and suddenly began struggling for my life.

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Oh, I know what you’re thinking: I’m here, right? Telling you this story. So everything obviously turned out okay. Well, let’s just say that things did not turn out exactly as you think they did.

To calm myself, I remember reasoning that the power of my own, personal mermaid was what was drawing me down to the depths, and any minute I would hear her siren song and be encased in a bubble of pure oxygen and light.

But time was running out.

My lungs and eardrums were ready to detonate, and a white-hot flash of panic suddenly flooded through the vascular highways of my body. A kind of instant text message was sent directly to my brain that basically said: “Uh-oh.”

Being the smart resourceful girl that I was, it was right around now when the thought occurred to me that perhaps magical thinking was not the world’s best substitute for an experienced lifeguard.

But to my surprise, the panic which should have logically accompanied that thought was replaced by a rather surprising feeling of complete wellbeing. Just like that, I was no longer Virginia Wolf with her pebble-filled pockets. I felt lighter than air, totally carefree, completely ready to accept the natural flow of my inevitable fate. I remember smiling as if death itself had just officially welcomed me.

I had arrived, albeit much faster than I ever could have imagined, at the rather intoxicating and dramatic finish line of my life, so there was no longer any real need at this point to hold my breath.

The story was no longer about me or my mom. It was about the descent and the sheer thrill that came with that moment of exquisite clarity which felt so all-consuming and generous that I surely must have begun to weep which is not easy to do while you are under all that water.

This moment was not a defeat of any kind. In fact, it felt like the total opposite. I felt like I had become a part of something far bigger than me now.

I had won.
I was finally the graceful ballerina enveloped in the spotlight cast by the moon.

I was Odette drowning in my own, personal Swan Lake whose exhilarating crescendo would be this final descent, en pointe.

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Words, images, thoughts, any logic of any kind meant nothing now.
All that mattered, maybe all that ever mattered was the dance.
I shut my eyes and braced myself for my transition as Tchaikovsky’s Op.19 began to play. My final thought was: He understands.
And that’s when I felt a pair of arms encircled me.

I opened my eyes, expecting to see daddy but instead, I came face to face with my own personal mermaid who kissed me lightly on the mouth.
That sent a giant stream of pure oxygen directly into my lungs. And believe it or not she spoke to me and I could hear her voice as clearly as I could my own thoughts. She said, simply...

“Not now.”
I tried to struggle my way free of her and get her to listen to me.

But clearly, my above the surface of the water vocabulary was useless down here. I needed desperately to defend my position, to argue the point that I belonged down here; that I no longer wanted to be a part of any world where my mother did not exist. And that’s when both her eyes suddenly lit up, like a pair of long ago candles. The kind that ancient wives used to place in their windows to become the beacon of light for their sailor husbands who had journeyed perhaps too far into the furthest and darkest reaches of the unknown and suddenly I could see my mom, floating deep inside my mermaid’s eyes like I was looking through a pair of binoculars directly into the rolling fields of heaven.

She smiled at me the way that statues of contented angels do and blew kisses to me that I could actually feel on my cheeks which made me feel suddenly sleepy and more loved than I had ever had in my entire life. As I started to fade away, I mouthed the words,

“I miss you.”
And she said, eloquently, as clearly as a mermaid song: “You will never miss what you can never lose.”

And then she signaled for me to look up and I did and way up there, far beyond the top of the water, I could see the night sky which looked exactly like the ceiling of my room and I knew instantly that was where I was headed to next, in one form or another, for the rest of

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my life. And so I closed my eyes and I began to float upwards, faster and faster and when I opened them and I was once again greeted by that clever night sky.

It took me a moment or two before I realized that I was no longer at the bottom of the lake, but was instead floating high atop my bed.

No explanation was required because I felt, no, I knew, with absolute certainty, that I had been carried there by mommy as a kind of homage, to our “it’s time for bed sleepyhead, ritual.”

Because that is what mommies do. They carry us. Whether they are here or long gone, that is what they do. They carry us. Knowing this, by instinct I suppose, I stood up on my bed, stretched my arms upwards, I closed my eyes and instead of praying for flight, I simply asked for it.

And just like that, I blasted off the launchpad of Cape Mattress, actuated by the propulsive velocity of not only mine, but every mother’s love.

I soared through the heavens of the untapped soul of that hand-painted universe and I could feel myself being born again but this time as a blazing protostar in the NGC 1275, 275 million light-years from yesterday and trillions of miles away from tomorrow. I began pulling in matter from a nearby envelope of gas and dust until I finally exploded, giving off a brilliant light that was ten times as luminous as the Sun.

Which left an indelible, punctuating comet trail in my wake, which ultimately became my own, personal, now and forever signature.

This maiden flight; this thrilling cosmological expedition would take me far beyond the outermost reaches of my imagination which, in time, would inform every book, every play, and every movie that I would go on to write from that point on. And that is why, whenever someone asks me what inspired my most current tale, my private answer will always be, my mom.

Eventually, I passed the unwritten rules of enchantment on to my own little girls, who learned to fly just like I did on sprouted gossamer wings.

Back then, on that day the day of my maiden flight, I remember the slowly rising sun, slowly pulling up my eyelids, informing through the language of light, that it was time to go to school.

Once dressed, I had my pre-bus ritual breakfast, which was now me, silence, and daddy who cracked his egg like it was the outer shell of his heart.

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As I cat licked the overflowing marmalade crusted edges of my favorite muffin, for reasons that I will never know, daddy suddenly looked up at me, like he had suddenly snapped out of a centuries-old spell, and for the first time in what seemed forever, he saw me.
And I saw him back.

Without saying a word, he smiled at me, just like he would when he would suddenly re-appear in my room after his latest disappearance.

But this time was different.
He didn’t say a word or offer me any forgive me snow globes. He was just there.

He stared at me in wonder, like he was falling in love all over again and then he started to cry. Because I think, no, I know that he saw my mother inside my eyes.
And without the shame of a closed door, he whispered to the pools of my eyes,

“I see you.”

He got up, as swift and silent as Chaplin, and offered me his hand which I grabbed like it was the brass ring of my Paris carousel and we glided like an Ouija board’s heart-shaped planchette to the long-shuttered down and forgotten stereo cabinet.

He flipped open the lid and with a skillful aim, he dropped the tonearm needle directly onto the anxiously waiting spinning vinyl track of mommy’s favorite song.

Joni Mitchell’s “A Case of You.”

I carefully climbed aboard the slippery slope of his well-worn slippers, pressed my cheek fully into his warm half-buttoned sweater and we enveloped each other.

And we started to dance.

And for the first time in months, we began to sing.

And both of us heard her voice join in.

When the song finished, we stared at each other for what felt like forever. And finally, daddy asked quietly,

“What are your favorite movies, Princess?

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And I looked up, crying now, and replied: “Every day.”

THE END