A Clockwork Heart

_{Originally written in January 2012 as tribute, as healing, as grieving.}

I have a clockwork heart.

When I wake up, all the gears tick, spin, and hum. They turn without protest as I swing my feet out of bed and go about my morning routine. Slow and steady, spokes touch spokes, turning the great machine that is my body and brain into a slide show of normality.

I wash my face.
(That looks like my mother’s if she were fat.)
I brush my teeth.
(That are crooked like hers but not like hers.)
I brush my hair.
(That darkened from a daisy-blond, like my mother’s. That is thinning as I age. Like my mothers.)

I miss you.

I look at my Christmas tree; I feel numb. I lay in bed at night and tried not to wake my husband as grief crept in like warning waves before the tsunami. I stare at the Christmas lights in our bedroom window and think their glow has been dimmed, like mine.

Inside my heart, the pieces wind down as the clock keeps ticking. Memories become slug-thick, crude oil that trickles down into all the once-working pieces until I can feel it struggle to beat. The wheels are slowing down.

I see: My mother is bored in a car, waiting for my father. I act like an idiot to entertain and get her to laugh. It works.

I see: My mother took me out one night to the casino. She keeps spending money. She keeps saying she has a good feeling about this machine or that. Soon, she’s spent so much that I dread us coming home. We are so in disbelief at how much money she’s lost that we’re laughing our heads off, hooting and howling, cackling and giggling the whole way home. My mother laughs so much on the doorstep that she begins to cry/cackle. She has to lean on the door so as not to fall. I laugh with her because I love nothing more than my mother, happy.

It’s hard for my heart to keep working. It keeps skipping and slipping; the wheels are choking on specks of dirt that bind delicate mechanics. I’m not looking at the tinsel on my walls, and I refuse to turn around and look at my tree. I think about all the places I promised I’d take her when she visited me in Florida. I think about all the food she’d never eat, the things I wanted to show her she’d never see.

I think about Disney. How she had always dreamed of visiting Disney.

My heart winds down to a stop, and all the gears jumble on top of one another, squeezing against my lungs. Springs, strings, screws, and broken childhood dreams pile up on one another; they are cars in the snow on the highway that don’t know how to keep from slipping. It grows and grows and grows until it feels like an angry hand reaches in to squeeze everything that I am until it breaks.

It feels just like dying, like someone you love has died.

I have a clockwork heart. During the day, its gears whir and spin, carrying me through the mundane with what feels normal. At night, it stops, and I am small and lost. There is no lullaby to sooth it.

The woman who once sang me songs in the terror of my night is gone. I hear only my heart screeching to a halt and the silence.

For my mother.
April 2nd, 1956 – December 11th, 2011