Conversations Among the Ruins

She didn't answer the door shyly this time, as it flashed to me, the first time I went to see her, the way she hid behind the wall, her giant deep brown pools of light eyes peering out at me from behind her mother and the wall.

Her shoulder length brown hair shines above a totally mismatched, triple layers of clothing outfit. She is obscure and beautiful, with a quirky kindness and unabashed gentle manner that not many people get to possess. You see this in the way that she picks up her Guinea Pigs, to show me proudly of how healthy they are and how much they have grown. You see this in the way that she picks up all of her Magic things to show me. "This scarf is magical because it looks like it's from another time." "These shells are magic because once they were a creatures's home." "This weird putty stuff is magic because I put it into the shell and it thinks it gets to be a home again." I just stare at her with a smile.

"Heather." "Yes Olivia?" "I don't tell the shells about how it isn't the real thing they are the home for or it would hurt their feelings, and that would make the shells less magic." "I dig it. That's really cool of you." I tell her.

She isn't wearing her glasses and it strikes me the way finding a diamond on a sidewalk would - just stops me as I take in how much she has grown, how much taller she is, how she isn't nervous she's just.. herself. Her smile shows that her fangs are still the same in her mouth, and her eyelashes are just as gigantic as when she was a minute old. "Ugh people at school are so freaked out by my fangs." She giggles.

Her names is Olivia Hope and she gave me Horus's Left Eye. She proudly showed me all of her books about Egypt and told me about Cleopatra and all sorts of other things I didn't know as I just sat there with her, in awe. She told me that we are mermaids, the both of us, and her thumb is her mermaid thumb, so I could sort of live there with her. She gave me a Tiger's eye stone and a chinese necklace and a piece of plastic jewelry from her treasure chest as she told me "I only give special people things from here."

I gave her a crystal ball and told her "I never want to just buy you "stuff." I want you to know that I love you and you are the most amazing and special person on this Earth, and so I try to always give you things that are the most important to me, things that I love the most and that are by me the most, because I can't be by you a lot." (Long ago I gave her a knit scarf that she always shows to me when I see her. "The perfume you put all over it wore off." She said the other day) and after that I watched her with, unabashed selflessness, give me things that were hers.

I felt her connect with what I was saying. I felt her understand me, and I felt present in that moment.

I am this amazing little girl's birth mother, and I have never said that sentence. Not ever, because in the past I had it all wrong. I always say "My daughter' and correct people saying how "I'm not her mother though. Like I don't have a kid or anything like that. She has parents. They are amazing."

It was always what she was to me, followed by a disorganized explenation and after so much time, I have finally seen how wrong I am. It isn't about me. It isn't about what she is to me, it is about what I am to her, and that is the woman that gave birth to her and gave her to her family, the people that love her and raise her and teach her life in a way I never in a million years could have.

What is exceptional about mine, Carrie, and Scott's and Olivia's story is that I get to visit her, and let me tell you something.

My life and a lot of things I have done within it are not for the faint of heart, and going to see Olivia and start an actual relationship with her is by far, without a doubt, the absolute scariest and biggest fear I have ever walked through and

after walking through that, it is the most incredibly rewarding aspect of my life.

I thought she would think I was a fuck up loser idiot if I met her, because I wasn't much, but I was all I thought or cared about. But the fact is, is that she loves me, and I am capable today of knowing this, and I am capable today of knowing that I love her. I am finally in some sort of a tune of understanding the gift I was privileged to give her parents only a near decade later, when I exchange life dialogue with my mother and father, and the joy that my Niece has brought into their life.

Sometimes I think "I gave that to somebody. Like that joy, that my parents have about their grand daughter, I gave to Carrie and Scott's parents." That was the first perspective of that I ever understood.

She plays the piano for me and asks of an ex boyfriend of mine that she always asks me about, about why we aren't together any more, I smile and tell her

"I was young, and when you are in love with somebody and that young, no matter how nice it is, you're going to get older and change and probably not change in the same ways."

"What do you mean young? You weren't young. It wasn't that long ago. You're like.. middle aged now."

I almost peed my pants I laughed so hard, after that I told her I'd write in her birthday card on her 28th birthday that she just said that me when I was 28.

She asks me why I didn't tell my parents I was pregnant with her and I sat there for a minute. Nobody in my life ever asked me that.

What I am lucky for is that she has a soul as old as mine and a gentle, compassionate wisdom and manner, so I didn't get scared that if I cried in front of her it would scare her.

I just couldn't find the words, until finally, I just looked her straight in the eyes and said

"I was so afraid. I was just scared and I didn't know what to do, so that's what happened."

"How old was I when you told them about me."

"Six.. nine months old or something."

"Why did you tell them then?"

"Because I was still scared."

"And what did they say."

"Well. They said Oh. And my mom said she saw your baby pictures and you looked like me, so she figured."

"That was it?"

I looked down at the floor for a long time when she said that, until a voice inside of me said "You don't have to do that" so I looked back up at her after a while and said

"Yeah that was it. It's hard for me to understand."

And Olivia nods, and she takes her small hand, and puts it on my arm, and doesn't say anything

I don't cry I just keep my eyes in hers. Life to life. Truth to truth.

That Atlantean Queen painting I made her two years ago hangs on her wall, underneath the bedroom ceiling Carrie and Scott had every constellation painted in glow in the dark. She has yellow walls and a princess like circle of bug netting over her bed, three lava lamps.

She keeps trying to tell me she is not an artist, as I smile and persistently insist that she is.

"All art is is what you make to show people what it looks like for you to be alive, because everything everybody feels looks different to every other person. You can do that!"

I think, for an instant, she believes me.

I said goodbye to her and she's too big now for me to pick her up and carry her around the room as I cry and tell her I'll see her again. She didn't ask me if it would be another eight years until she'd see me again. She didn't cry and neither did I, because we weren't sad; I was just privileged. Privileged to be a part of this incredible story of something so great I am only a small part that went along with it. Privileged to possess honesty, and compassion, and to watch it be returned to me by somebody that is half my age as if she is twice my age.

You'd really never believe that half of it, even if it's in your own heart beat. I am one of the lucky ones. One of those readers of this life, of this love, of astounding possibility and great measures of growth and respect. Grown up, ridiculous, and just as invisible in these parts of the country as I've always been to some.

But some

isn't

all.

HL

HL

I was staring at
mountains today but
all I could see was my

Grandfathers house.

I used to pick up rocks
there as a four year old,
name them, take them on

vacation around the block
and return them to the
pile I got them, and tell my

Grandfather "So they can
tell the rest what they
saw and felt."

I missed my Grandfather and
those shrubs the rocks live
under even now and the flat

of Illinois but
the thought of going home
to visit makes me sick
to my stomach.

I sat in some hundred
and seven degree sun
today listening to the

joy of my mom and dad,
squealing and excitedly telling
me everything my baby niece

has done, how she walks and
says "Horsey" and opens every
cabinet and locks Chunk out

of the room with her childproof
gate. I haven't ever in my life
heard my parents sound so

happy. Hands down, not ever.
I sat in that sun, like a rock
with a smile.

Because for the first time
I can sort of wrap my head around
what I gave to a family when I gave

birth to a baby girl and
picked out her family.

Phone calls like that - talking
about how the baby learns,
talking about their little girl,

how she learned to walk,
the words she must have said,
things she got into, how she ate

her first birthday cake. Everything
about a new life

is an exciting miracle to witness.
I was imagining Olivia's parents
today, how they got to have

phone calls like that with
their family.

And I
loved

myself for those
moments and I

didn't miss the world
as much

after all.

Nine years ago today I was eighteen and in labor.
I never actually thought I'd give birth. To a person. That part slipped my mind.
I was young. I didn't think that far ahead.

Only my head got to that place when I sat gazing blankly at a duck print hospital wall sheet divide.
I couldn't in a million years tell you how I did it. Women give birth every day I suppose.

I guess in some way becoming a mother teaches you to not make the day you gave birth to a human being about you, but about them. That took me a long time, and as it so happens, that tiny person I gave birth to has the most beautiful, incredible spirit of a mother I have ever seen. Her name is Carrie. Carrie is my only extremely clear memory of giving birth for 23 hours. She was asleep next to me in a rocking chair reading a parenting magazine. We watched Cinderella 2 together. In years to come I will see a picture of that tiny baby, four years old, in a Cinderella costume meeting Cinderella herself.

Nine years ago I was in labor with a baby girl to be named Olivia Hope. She is in Florida, watching Dolphins and sunsets. She loves fish and the ocean and occasionally, if you ask her specifically what color, the color yellow. Olivia loves to play tag and eat dessert and crafts are her favorite thing to do. She has two pet guinea pigs and loves plants, flowers and gardening. She is an actress that can fake any accent perfectly, and she is very proud of her fang teeth because she runs around like a small animal, making the noises,

Her hair is dark brown, her eyes too, but they turn amber in the most magic sorts of light. She has a three foot stack of headbands in her bathroom, which is decorated with fish, and she is saving all of her money in her piggy bank to go to Chile, to investigate the biggest swimming pool in the world. She loves to swim and when she stares at me innocently and says

"Want to play?"

The fact that I have no relative idea what that even means to an eight year old completely goes away. Suddenly anything I ever considered about being "cool" and "reserved" is overwhelmingly void. Olivia sits with her father on google, looking up anything they can think of on the internet, and her mom makes her sandwiches, and they all sit at a kitchen table for dinner. She dresses up her dogs and collects oddly shaped perfume bottles, and she gave me a pillow.

It's a satin heart with dolphin stickers all over it. "She worked so hard putting those stickers on there." Carrie said softly a year ago. I think of that every time I look at it. She is nine and capable of requiring an honesty within me that I've never been able to give anybody else, as she has no problem staring me dead in the face to ask me questions. She walks with a purpose, weather it be to show me a calendar where she named all of the guinea pigs or to get into the car, turn to me and say "Come on!"

The insanity of what my life was at eighteen years old is something I am privileged to talk honestly and quietly about with Carrie and Scott as Olivia sits next to me, absorbed in Scooby Doo in a car. I just kept looking over at her, as if she'd vanish if I moved too suddenly.

I got Olivia a full bright gold Egyptian pyramid jewelry box for her birthday. Inside of it is a giant black diamond, a rainbow of colors because I

am a pyramid sometimes, at my best, structure and strength. Olivia is the diamond within it, that takes up the most room and gives the pyramid a reason to stand.

Nine years ago today Olivia Hope was born. There is no gift greater. Not for me, not for her family, and not for the world.

At the time I was young and I didn't think this far ahead, nor could I have ever. I didn't possess a capacity to understand. At times, I still don't. I worried for years that she would meet me and be horrified at what she saw. But she wasn't and I know she never will be.

It's been a long road. But the best road. I am thankful for March the twenty fourth and
for as many years as I live I
always will be.

"I wanted to come in April." She said to me once.
"But I know you needed me to get here sooner, so I did."

HL

She bought a
pyramid in a
gaudy

tourist trap
on
Las Vegas
Boulevard.

Nobody
noticed how

well it fit
in her hands,

as she walked
in shoes
worn

to the sticky
floor. Her hair

is in matts,
her fingers

covered in
paint as both

hands grip
the structure.
She doesn't

look up or
away. Just in
between
stars.

She put the
pyramid on
her credit card.

Took it home
to spray it
metallic gold.

Smiling softly,
placing a softball
sized

rainbow
black diamond
within the
center.

She has grown
to love
pyramids

and
any daughter
of hers

deserves
for her birthday
and every day

to have
one of

her very
own.

There is no
copy. Not a
replica or

any way

to describe
the reasoning
behind it.

Besides
absurd and

magical and
whole. What

I've always
wanted to
be for

her in a
structure that

can live
in her
room.

I

think about
you

all of the
time. I

wonder what
you think about

before you go
to sleep. I

wonder what you
look like

when you leave
for school.

I imagine, that
you wonder
the same things

about me
too. I wonder
if you

trust
how much
that for
always

I will
love you

and that
no matter
what

in the whole
entire
universe

I am right
there. You are

an eight year
old that

is saving all of
the money in
your piggy bank

to go to
Chile.

You are
mezmorizing
and the most

beautiful
person
on this

planet;
the greatest

gift
I never knew
how to wrap

because
the only paper
was my

stomach. I
wonder if

you get like
I do

in crowded
rooms, where

they make me
nervous and I
take myself

somewhere
else. To a
place

where it's
easier, and
full of

ecstatic
life. It's the

place in my
head

where I think
about you.

Every
single
day. I

get to
have that.

My life is
an unusually
placed

scrap book
on this
planet and

because of
you

so many
pages
are simply

beyond
extraordinary.