*disney music sounds thick. 2001-12-15 1:25 a.m.*

i wish i knew her when she was a young woman in the '30's. right when she discovered alcohol and drugs, before she became dependent on them.

i wish i knew her as someone other than the woman who gave me so much food all the time, and that she knew me as someone other than the girl who never ate enough food to please her, but still was "chubby" and got her father's laziness, proven by the fact that i don't drive.

i wish i didn't view her through the lens of my mother's stories of a woman who blamed her and her sister for her attempted suicide. the aa meetings that gave my mother her strength, and the childhood habits that made it easy to enable my father.

i wish i could remember being the young child reaching my arms up to her and saying, "sooooo big," rather than being the adolescent in the car with her as she commented on how good the sermon on tolerance was and going on to talk about the article in the paper about the "nigger" who murdered a bunch of people.

basically, the point is i wish i knew her.

i am relieved for her that she died without too much suffering, but i wonder if my lack of real grief is because i'm aware that it's "for the best" or because it's in many ways the death of a stranger. a stranger i lived with for the second half of 5th grade, as i clung to my mother in bed, listening across the hall to weird sleeptalking howls. a stranger with a stepchair, 2 year old catalina dressing, and home-canned pickles. there was a lot of love in that woman, and i felt it, but i don't feel like it's gone.

i wonder...

*listening to: *
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