Letter 01: Requiem for a Lingering Love

Almost every night, when I have a TV series that I think my mother would like, I stay up far later than I intend to. My mother, who works for far too long and has a million tasks to do in her mind. My mother, who sits in the living room in a flurry of tiredness and toned-down anxiety and far too little sleep and looks to me with a gentle look and asks me if I’m not too tired to watch an episode of a series we can bond over. I think I’ll be asleep by 9 PM, but I’m sitting alongside my mother nearing midnight, laughing through the sleepy haze that’s worth every single minute.

First, it was Anne With An E. Now, Bridgerton. We pause and talk for so long, our voices quiet but passionate in the way we share, the way I couldn’t have gotten from anyone except for her.

I always think we need those moments of quiet after a day filled with so much chaos I think I could drown in it. I think maybe she does drown in it, that maybe these moments mean as much to her as they do to me. Sometimes I’ll look to her, and she’ll be smiling at a particularly sweet moment, and I’ll think about how this is one of those moments–so few and far between–where she doesn’t feel impossible to reach. Where she’s right there and I’m right here, the way I secretly think it always should be.

And I feel so struck by it. I wish I could immortalize the moment of sweet quiet. I wish my mother could live the peaceful life in the countryside that she’s spoken about for years now, with lush greenery and time. Time to knead and bake bread from scratch, to make fruit jam and send a jar to each of her neighbors, to speak on the phone with her siblings about peaceful, slow days instead of the hurried, anxious tone she’d held for far longer than I’ve been alive.

I guess, in this short little letter, I wanted to talk about how much love there is in simply staying, even if it’s pointless and you know you’ll be incredibly tired the next day. Because sometimes, through a throwaway comment about a decision a certain character makes, my mother and I can look at each other with an understanding we don’t often have. 

Love becomes so easy when you stay for each other, is what I’m trying to say. even if my confused professor struggles to meet my rapidly drooping eyes the next morning.

The Raincoat by Ada Limón
When the doctor suggested surgery
and a brace for all my youngest years,
my parents scrambled to take me
to massage therapy, deep tissue work,
osteopathy, and soon my crooked spine
unspooled a bit, I could breathe again,
and move more in a body unclouded
by pain. My mom would tell me to sing
songs to her the whole forty-five minute
drive to Middle Two Rock Road and forty-
five minutes back from physical therapy.
She’d say, even my voice sounded unfettered
by my spine afterward. So I sang and sang,
because I thought she liked it. I never
asked her what she gave up to drive me,
or how her day was before this chore. Today,
at her age, I was driving myself home from yet
another spine appointment, singing along
to some maudlin but solid song on the radio,
and I saw a mom take her raincoat off
and give it to her young daughter when
a storm took over the afternoon. My god,
I thought, my whole life I’ve been under her
raincoat thinking it was somehow a marvel
that I never got wet.

• The new season of Bridgerton (evidently).

• Writing in iambic pentameter.

• The book club I’m in with my sister & some family friends.

• Past Lives (2023).

• More Derry Girls, and the songs I’ve discovered through it. See: