Kiara’s Reviews > Writers & Lovers > Status Update

I'm in the mood to call my mother, that happy, shift in the wind mood. I calculate the time in Phoenix. Nearly noon. Perfect. The bolt retracts, and I remember she died.

It’s good to see art, to remember what a natural human impulse it has always been.

I squat there and think about how you get trained early on as a woman to perceive how others are perceiving you, at the great expense of what you yourself are feeling about them. Sometimes you mix the two up in a terrible tangle that's hard to unravel.

When I was fifteen, my father's girlfriend, Ann, had my sweaters dry-cleaned. My mother used to wash them in Woolite and lay them on a towel to dry, but she was in Phoenix with Javi by then, and my father and I were living at Ann's and she would gather up my sweaters while I was at school. They'd come back a few days later on hangers covered in paper, sheathed in long plastic bags, which she hung on my closet door…

And then I feel sad for that person who has so much compassion because she's clearly been through the same thing, too. And the cycle keeps repeating. It's like when you go into a dressing room with a three-paneled mirror and you line them up just right to see the long narrowing hallway of yourselves diminishing into infinity. It feels like that, like I'm sad for an infinite number of my selves.

I look into my eyes, but they aren't really mine, not the eyes I used to have. They're the eyes of someone very tired and very sad, and once I see them I feel even sadder and then I see that sadness, that compassion, for the sadness in my eyes, and I see the water rising in them. I'm both the sad person and the person wanting to comfort the sad person.