De Ce Monde Secret de l’ Amelie Americaine

I looked for the last time through the window of my apartment in Los Angeles. I had finished repainting the walls back to their original hospital white. Only two months earlier I painted my bedroom magenta. I blew glitter from my hand on to the wet paint so that the walls would sparkle. Like every other noble effort of mine, the intensity overwhelmed me. I had to shut my eyes every time I walked into the room.

It was 80 degrees in December, hot and stagnant. The seasons were not going to change, my family would not change, my life would not change, unless I changed.

In my dreams I couldn’t breathe. My dead grandmother came inside my head while I slept and push down on my chest so that I couldn’t move. She forced to me to listen to the same song over and over again that said “You have to go and leave me.” I had to scratch her to move. I had to betray what I was conditioned to believe was right, so that I might have a chance at a real life.

I had always done what I was told, so I didn’t know how to move forward at first on my own. I was spinning in the same routine, with no where to go, adrift in my own rut. Despite the quests I made for physical and spiritual perfection, everything I did turned out wrong and ineffective.

I’d spend hours meditating, hoping that enlightenment would float down on me at last and that all would be healed. I opened my eyes and looked at the copper budda statue that I used to hold my burning incense. It was laughing at me. It said, “Little girl, this changes nothing.”

My grandmother kept a miniature budda on her desk, that she bought on a trip to Asia. She taught me to make a wish and rub the budda’s tummy. If the budda granted wishes for a good daughter, then my life would have already been a panacea. No such luck.

On this day I prepared myself for another journey. If I was going to fail at life then I might as well fail at something that meant something real to me. I was moving to New York. I had loaded my car, my cats, and whatever could fit into two suitcases. The rest was given away.

I had bought some small gifts at the health food store: scented candles, soap, flashes cards with positive slogans written on them like, “Be the change you want to see in the world” and “carpe diem.”

I didn’t know what else to do. There was no appropriate gift or card suited to this moment. My birth mom didn’t know it, but I was about to say goodbye.

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