For Ellen

My mom walks into my room and begins to talk, talking just to talk, to fill my lungs with her breath, to root herself in my world. We absorb each other. But right now, I am not porous; I am not permeable. Instead, I am an impenetrable wall of teenage snark. I am annoyed. I begin to send her away, knowing full well that in a not-too-far-off time and place, I will get mad at her for not staying. She begins to leave, but not before wanting to turn on the fan, turn down the bed, make me some tea; she could give me the world and still ask if I needed anything.

As she lingers in the doorway, I take her in: navy sweatpants and a hoodie zipped up to her collarbone – the one she

bought from that cheesy surf-shop in San Diego. This embarrasses me, makes me laugh but not out loud. Beneath the glinting silver of her zipper is a still-pink scar. Her downy hair curls gently around her ears. It's growing back in. If you unzipped the hoodie further you would see more scars - on her hips, on her belly; she grew the cancer like she grew my brother and me. Her body betrayed her so mercilessly, so recklessly, so cruelly close to where Michael and I first discovered what it was to have a heartbeat.

Elizabeth Knowlton, Ellen Knowlton. I've told her everything that has ever happened to me, every thought that has passed through my head, every question I probably should have just Googled. She knows the depths of me just as I was carved from the depths of her. We have matching birthmarks on our right cheeks, an inch and a half from the creases of our eyes, measured out roughly with finger and thumb. We have the same nose--the one her uncle told her she should thank God for, because otherwise she'd be ‘too beautiful to bear’. We both dance too often. We both laugh too hard, our jokes funniest to ourselves when we think no one else has heard them.

Here on my bed, she pinches my little toes for the millionth time, asks me if I know they're her favorite. I do, of course. I always found it a bit disheartening that these two toes were my mother's favorite quality of mine. But maybe it's because they're the last things she can hold in her hand, put in her pocket, like coins or marbles or pieces of gum. They are the last things that truly feel like hers.

It is three years later and my mother’s face fills the screen. I squint through the glare as she pretends to give me a sip of her coffee, her hands crowding towards the camera, willing herself to stretch across the country. And for a second, she succeeds. She is right there, laughing beside me.

My mother’s skin is a window. Warmed by the sun, streaked with rain. The world rages within her and I can see it all. I see her, as she sees me. I seek to know her, as she seeks to understand me: to find out if I made my bed this morning, or the last name of my date from the week before.

We are each other’s polygraphs. It is mid-afternoon and I am quiet. The guests on her favorite radio show laugh loudly, picking up my slack. Quiet, leaning my head against the car window. “What’s wrong?” Quiet. “Please tell me.” I cry so hard and so silently and she already knows why. And so she wipes away my tears. She lets me sit in my silence. She lets me float, breathe. She is quiet; I finally feel lighter. 

My love for her is heavy. It is painful to carry, to protect, to hold with two hands. It knocks the wind out of me, spills into my lap like the moonlight that spilled across us that night we reclined in the front seats of my car, sad music and bad news, crying because we realized that maybe this thing wasn’t for forever.

My love is for her sense of humor, for her pure joy, for the small noise she lets escape every time she is about to speak. I never know what she's going to say but I know when she's going to say it. I know she's going to use her hands and too many words to tell me what I'll immediately forget.

Hearing her voice is hearing a lock click; it is the sound of coming home.

And this voice sounds silly sometimes, like when she talks to our pets or rehashes her college French; like when she speaks of her unrelenting love for me, unaware that I am more like an anchor than a child to hold, more of a cross to bear than the daughter she bore. But there is so much noise that I am grateful for, so many songs we have sung for each other. She tells me of her months in Paris, of the boy who fell in love with her on a train, of the cheap bread and wine. She shows me the letter he had written her that very day--teaches me the romance of being young and creative and maybe a little bit lonely.

She cries at my poetry and laughs when I don’t know I’m being funny. She texts me a heart as often as she breathes and answers my 3:00 a.m. calls so I can tell her through tears of unromance and cruelty, of strangers’ hands’ acting without invitation, of anxiety that won’t let go.

We are not the same women, but we are cut from the same cloth.

Sometimes I get nervous that my edges are too frayed, that I unravel too quickly.

And maybe I do.

I know that moments will come when I will collapse, when I will shift and shatter into an inevitable mess on the floor. But I also know that she will be there – to pick me up, to make me tea, to tell me I’m beautiful, to ask if I need anything, when the answer to that question has always been simpler than either of us realized.