Velvet

I looked up at a faded photograph, stuck in the crevices of the dresser mirror. It was familiar. It had been there so long that dust settled around the edges against the mirror. My mother donned a sandy brown afro and innocent smile while she posed in one of my grandmother’s blouses. A young Nellie looked on lovingly at her daughter-in-law. The veil hung in the background of the nostalgic scene like an old friend. My mother would light up when she reminisced about the early days, playing dress-up with Nellie. Her mother-in-law was fashion forward and always willing to have a meeting behind the veil. My mother was untainted in that photograph, unmarred by infidelity and midnight calls from mistresses. She had not been broken, yet, by abandonment. She had not yet fed her last canned good to her children before lying in bed herself, famished and brokenhearted. Her stride was not slackened by disappointment and ragged acceptance. Her truth had been the same as mine until, one day, it wasn’t. I turned away from the photograph to look at my mother in the flesh. Except for a few stray gray hairs, her hairline remained. Her beautiful mahogany complexion was still flawless, despite the few lines that time had engraved in her forehead. As she always joked, her children had given her more hips and thighs. But, for the first time, I connected the woman in the photograph to the woman before me. Before then, the she did not exist. Although she charmed me with stories about her childhood and her experiences in the 70s, her character was fictional, non-existent, intangible. She had been omnipresent, an all-seeing-all-knowing narrator. How ignorant I was to think her life only went back as far as I could remember. She had a host of experiences and truths and misshapen dreams that have long-since floated off past a visible horizon. She had adventurous notions of climbing mountains, yet here she found herself hanging from a cliff. My mother’s truth would be forever marked by her experience. And, she had shared her truth with me. Men cheat. Women accept. They move on. They adapt. They cry alone. And, they foreshadow all such atrocities for their daughters in order to lessen the blow of reality. She hurt me because she loved me. I reached out my shattered wings to encase another broken-winged bird.