There, rest. No more suffering for you.

I sit in a room, my office, typing at my desk. In front of me, at eye level, is a plant ( just the right amount of sunlight) that I will very likely kill, and my thoughts go from here to my mother. I think thoughts (inchoate) about rootlessness and the impossibility of living beyond her. 


I think about this house, hers, and what is left of her. I think: I want to write about it, I want to write about it all, but my eyes are fixed on this plant, this thing, this reminder of what I will never again have: a mother to tend to it (to me) to make it, the plant (this life) better than it is. 


 Recompense for the six others that I inherited--and killed--after my mother's death, this plant, despite living past its projected expiry, and despite my watchful eye (eye level) is wilting. Yet rather than transplant it, rather than do the very thing (fertile ground) that will keep it alive, I do nothing. I commit to no plan of action, but continue to obsess and observe it but myself too, in the face of it.  Contemplative, I cannot but think after nine months of staring that I must want the plant to die, that it the plant, my mother's green thumb, lost on me doesn't matter much.  I recognize and rise as music fills the room that I have tried but failed to render it, this plant, analogous to one of those things dripping with sentiment that have come to serve as proof of life, like "the silver" for families of greater wealth, or the wedding veil bag the dress, how could she wear it, so primitive? for those with mothers who had weddings. 


My mother, of course, had neither, but she left me nonetheless, and with the perfect knowledge that "fair" and "deserving" are adjectives to be reserved for the qualification of a supreme fiction she never complained, she lived her pain, she worked her whole life and saw death and was stunningly beautiful.  she lost what little money she had and then her hair and use of her legs and then her life to cancer and used sparingly, if ever, and only as the faintest praise.