Erasure
not
a scrap left behind
no
signatures,
no business ledgers,
no
hard-to-decipher hieroglyphic handwriting
not
even a social security card
or
a birthday card
even
all the addresses,
new
and abandoned,
were
hidden with a careful application
of
black magic marker
across
each one in the address book
All
the negatives
most
of the photos--
books,
clothing that belonged
to
someone else
she
must have spent most of her days
in
a haze of anger, confusion,
and
caution,
wiping
out any trace of anyone else
who
ever lived—or died—
in
that house,
until
the only thing that remained
was
one old woman
who
lost even the memory of herself
Of course, I saw the title and expected one of those ~actual~ erasure poems (Many of which just don't do it for me).
ReplyDeleteBut this, JT, is something else altogether. Something about ten steps above.
DAMNgood.
damn but I may just have to marry you, if only for the applause.
DeleteAnd thank you.
Narcissists, I discovered, have a way of eliminating everything from their lives that isn't about them. It's sometimes chilling to discover just how far they will go to do that.
This was my MIL’s life. Sad and wasteful.
ReplyDeleteAlways a waste, and yet they seem so needy, at the same time--I always knew my mother was basically a terribly insecure person, and this was apparently the way she hid it.
DeleteBut the damage they do in the pursuit of Self is appalling. Did your MIL place blame? My mother was a master at it.