My Mother's Life Was Way

The Translucence That Comes When Life Hardens Into A Bead Of Such Cruel Perfection You See It With The Purest Clarity. Everything Suddenly There--life As It Truly Is, Enormous, Appalling, Devastating. You See The Great Sinkholes It Makes In People And The Harrowing Lengths To Which Love Will Go To Fill Them.

At Night I Would Lie In Bed And Watch The Show, How Bees Squeezed Through The Cracks Of My Bedroom Wall And Flew Circles Around The Room, Making That Propeller Sound, A High-pitched Zzzzzz That Hummed Along My Skin. I Watched Their Wings Shining Like Bits Of Chrome In The Dark And Felt The Longing Build In My Chest. The Way Those Bees Flew, Not Even Looking For A Flower, Just Flying For The Feel Of The Wind, Split My Heart Down Its Seam.

I Wondered What It Was Like To Be Inside Her, Just A Curl Of Flesh Swimming In The Darkness, The Quiet Things That Had Passed Between Us.

Honeybees Depend Not Only On Physical Contact With The Colony, But Also Require It's Social Companionship And Support. Isolate A Honeybee From Her Sisters And She Will Soon Die.

Finally, I Began To Write About Becoming An Older Woman And The Trepidation It Stirred. The Small, Telling "betrayals" Of My Body. The Stalled, Eerie Stillness In My Writing, Accompanied By An Ache For Some Unlived Destiny. I Wrote About The Raw, Unsettled Feelings Coursing Through Me, The Need To Divest And Relocate, The Urge To Radically Simplify And Distill Life Into A New, Unknown Meaning.