Like Stars, Permanent + Fixed.

Life as a Living Memoir.

Georgia O’Keefe. Starlight Night. 1917

My 19-year-old daughter is laying in the crook of my shoulder. She is bereft because I’m leaving tomorow. I’m equally sad and weepy. She and I seem to always feel the same thing. If Edie is bereft, than I am, too. This is how it is.

It’s the end of a week-long college tour across New York State. Lucy, (21) Edie and me in a rental Toyota careening through rainy, damp college towns hoping for academic and residential life epiphanies and the promise of ample scholarships, while sporatically showing up at the doorsteps of old college friends and family. My flight back to Vegas is going out tomorrow at 11am.

Edie dozes. She is here and not. Her head is a limp rock. I’m staring at the ceiling. I feel the cool Queens night blow in through the crack of the second floor, brownstone window. I’m jotting down notes with one hand on the computer. I’m trying to make this moment permanent and fixed. I want to capture it, clutch it in my fists. I’m a three-year-old that might accidently strangle her beloved butterfly with her huge and overbearing love.

This is one of the most beautiful nights of my life, I whisper into her hair and kiss her head.

I mean it. I thought these times of great intimacy with my children might’ve ended. I certainly never had this with my own mom, even though she might have ached for it deeply, had I let her have this. I wish I had let her have this. Edie chuckles and settles deeper into my shoulder. She falls asleep again, churns, and rolls over.

It is life-affirming to be handed the rare chance to climb into the bed of your grown adult, perfectly competent and independent daughter, and have her need you again. To feel the weight of her head, like a limp boulder, as if she were a needy toddler. To feel useful and incredibly vital in her world. It is, quite frankly, a moment to be boomarked and made indelible.

Even in the throes of some future-possible-dementia, will I hold onto this? Will it still exist if I forget it? What if no ones cares? What if Edie forgets? I write about it to get it all down, to fix this feeling to an aspect of the physical world. To make it real.

Georgia O’Keeffe. Evening Star No.III. 1917.

I’m one of those people whose best lived moments are not the big ones. The weddings, graduations, parties, vacations, and holidays. For those, I tend to be in curation mode. It’s work. Pleasant work. Crowded, busy, fulfilling, sometimes exciting work. Sometimes tireless. But the curation itself creates a separation from the connections that can be made. I mean, does anyone hosting Thanksgiving sit down for a bloody second to savor the moment? Rarely.

I prefer to fill myself with the little happenings. The times of awe and unexpected wonder that happen almost against our will. They stick. You end up re-telling them at parties, in intimate conversations with friends, reliving them during long walks, srawling them into your dirty, collapsing notebooks. But I write them down anyway. Memory is funny. What I remember is not quite in line with what I jot down in the immediacy of it all. But I accept all versions; fiction, non-fiction, a hybrid mix.

Let’s just say that’s how it happened? Lucy jokes, when she tells a story with a slightly altered, but better ending. Make the fish you caught bigger, I say. It’s better for the story. Better for the re-telling.

Georgia O’Keefe. Evening Star, No. VII. 1917

I will never forget when I finally, after years of longing, moved to NYC by myself. I was 27. I had never eaten sushi. I wore cowboy boots. But there I was, in my own, rented studio apartment on the 15th floor of a building on 100th street. I settled in and later, when it got dark, I caught a glimpse out the window. I had never really seen the city at night from my own window before.

This girl, from a small country town, population 2,760, with one forever-blinking stop light, was staring out across vast, seemingly endless city lights, buildings in the sky, thousands of little rectangles, lit yellow, people living their New York lives somewhere inside them. And I was one of them. I had my own yellow rectangle. I slid the window open and heard the hums, shouts and horns. Just like I imagined. Never quiet. never boring. The breeze was cool and crisp through the screen. I was electric and vibrating. I felt unfathomably rich. Like I had a say in the world. Like I was pure, trembling potential.

I wrote down that feeling. I read it again and again from an old journal. I wrote it down to make it as permanent and fixed as it can be. To help me remember when I can’t. To climb back into that feeling again. Maybe I’m a writer only because I have to have a way to make these little happenings real? To bear witness that they happen? To provide a permanent record of my love and my despair and my life? Maybe I collect everyday experiences in words, in case I lose them, like marbles and trinkets in the hidden boxes of my hippocampus?

And then I remember the things my mother treasured that went into the dumpster after she died. Who will need what I leave behind? Who will read about what we did here?

Georgia O’Keefe. Black Cross with Stars and Blue, 1929.

In the morning, Edie Ubers with me to JFK. A few last minutes together. We have two long hugs. One is not, seemingly, enough. I write this essay on the plane on the way home, window seat, lots of room. All the details I vomit into my notes. I want to remember last night. Every little sinew, smell and texture. Her head under my chin. The feel of being under the yolk-colored comforter we bought together to set up her room. Being needed. Valuable. Tethered to one of my favorite humans. Her comfort as she falls asleep. The way our bodies are remember the ease of being together. I’m the girl seeing the vastness of the city for the first time. I’m electric, even on this plane, even as I write.

I get a message, on airplane wifi, that a close family member has been diagnosed with stage four metastatic cancer. In his 50’s. Two teenagers, a wife, a whole life. It’s a rough cancer and a rough diagnosis. More messages. I feel the air escape my lungs, and for a couple seconds, I stop breathing. The involuntary mechanism doesn’t kick in. I will myself to inhale. This news frames the last lingering bits of goodness from being with Edie. They swell and swirl around each other, yin and yang-style. Stars churning.

To have one, we must accept the other. A stupid, but necessary non-fiction.

Nothing, and no one, is permanent and fixed. Not our memories. Not our stories. Not the people we love. Not ourselves. Not the computer program or the paper we write on. This may be the last time I get to hold my kid all night and comfort her while she comforts me. We may never do this again, or need to. The recording of it in memory and words, will be what is left. A small, ghosty souvenir of something vital that came and, like everything, went.

Even the stars in the sky are not fixed or permanent. We just want them to be.

Thank you, as always for reading. Kim xo