What I Missed

It sounds crazy but it has only occurred to me to miss you recently. To ponder for the past couple years about you. That is recent when I think of the sixteen years I lived without you.
There was the time I was four and had chicken pox (the itching, oh the itching!) and I ran away from you not wanting to get into the white water of the bath. The oatmeal didn’t help. And you chased me, a naked three year old, like a strange Dalmatian, only white with red spots.
Then the hospital (but I still did not understand). All those tubes and how thin your face was. You were so pale but I offered you French fries, my way of helping.
Now the boyfriends come but there is no one to interrogate them. No one to make promises of security.
I remember happiness the day you died; I did not have to go to school that day.
She held everything together, the family I mean. She took both sets of responsibilities on her shoulders and raised us well.
-Be self sufficient, never rely on someone else (how can you say that when you keep making the same mistake? always thinking that the new man will fix everything).
-Always help those in need (like the time when it was raining and she drove the old man home. The one that looked lost).
-Be grateful for what you have (and there was so little sometimes but we were happy to share what there was with one another).
There was the time we were in the car and it was sunny out and it was just my sister, me and two other girls. The country song came on, the one that made us both cry. My sister’s knuckles tight on the wheel as tears slid silently down. The lyrics about a father watching his baby grow up. He danced with her on her wedding day.
There was the time you caught me eating ketchup crackers at midnight (mom would’ve been so mad if she knew how late I stayed up). All to catch you coming home from the night shift and you were so happy to see me.
I hate that I barely remember you, that there are just these few snatches of time of the years I spent with you.
There were whispers composed of ignorance. “They all have it, what the Perkins actor had, and they can give it to you just as easily if you so much as touch one fingertip.”
Her name is not important but it was her whose father bought her that car and taught her to drive it. He who came to get her that day at school when she got sick and threw up.
We stayed with Mom’s friend (the gay one) when you died. It was fun; I wore the pink shirt and watched the circus.
This part I don’t remember but Mom does. For a while after you passed I would sit in your chair in the living room and cry. Sleeping though, only when I was sleeping. The TV was on and it was the sound that would bring her, confused to see only me alone.
I don’t remember a funeral.
Your ashes are here though, in a duck taped box. When will we scatter them? What are we all holding on to?
There are other children who aren’t allowed to play with us. “What is AIDS?” They ask their mothers as the hand pulls them away.
The first time I really thought about it, about loss, was at the sweet sixteen where both her parents cried. Her father gave the speech. It confused me; I had never felt like I was missing something before. He was proud of her, he had raised her.
You were no angel but you were mine.
I have a hole in me where all the things that might have been go. You taught me how to ride the pink bike (not the man that I hated, the one that came after you). You paid for the ballet lessons that I had wanted so badly (but that a waitress’s salary could not cover). You put the fear of God into my first boyfriend (the one that smoked pot, the one I never should have gotten involved with in the first place). You lectured me when I got drunk for the first time. You were there at my graduation, applauding my first job, giving me away at my wedding, spoiling my children your grandchildren.
It is in this place that I remember your funeral, the whole family mourning you. In this place I actually knew you, therefore could finally let you go.