Conversation with My Mother at 3 A.M. on Her Birthday, After I Was Crying and Asking for a Sign that She was Here with Me

My Mother:

I don’t make the lights flicker in your fucking ceiling, Jessica. I make the lights flicker inside you. You still don’t get it, do you.

You’ve written about it. You’ve rhymed about it. You’ve illustrated about it. And you are still not completely certain where the gold is. Not out there where people spend their time arguing about where the gold is. But inside you. Inside people is where the potential for preciousness exists.

Don’t you ever walk around feeling satisfied for being groomed, polished and vacuumed, while your insides are ignored and uncharted.

Find a spot to sit in your wildness, Jessica, where no one’s criticism matters, and where you don’t need the agreement from others about who you are or aren’t.

And you sit there until you realize you’re cozy in that home of yours, Jessica. And that it’s been decorated just for you by your unique experiences. And that those experiences are waiting for you to understand and realize how magnificent they have made you.

And then, when it’s time to get up and open your mouth, you share a little of what your home is like. You share a little about what you have understood about the world from your home.

You don’t open your mouth and say something to get the attention of someone else so that they can give you what you don’t imagine you already have. No. You find your home inside yourself and you decorate the world with it. And someone will find beauty in what you’ve given, just as you have found beauty when you’ve encountered a glimmer in the eye of someone who is giving themselves instead of taking or ignoring on their way to somewhere they imagine is better.

What I don’t think you realize is, humans exist in more than one place. Every time you give yourself and someone internalizes that part of you-- not your vacuumed home or your polished nails… well you don’t groom of course, I forgot... but you know what I mean-- when you give the understood and precious parts of yourself that are not needing to be bought or sold or altered, that person will always have you in their heart.

It’s just like that poor fuck Jesus said—internalize me, and I will be here. Really, I think that’s one of the problems with the world. People have been keeping themselves for a rainy day because they fear their wildness will be criticized or dismissed, and instead they vacuum and groom and polish and avoid existing in their most glorious understood state. And they never really get to exist in the worlds of others. Only their anger at not being invited out into the world gets internalized.

And if you think of life as not simply a phenomenon of individuals being born and dying, but as a continuation of humanity-- people are continuing with next to nothing. They have no company in their hearts. Instead, they have holiday cards, reruns and jingles, Jessica.

So, I want you to think of how lucky you are, because I happened to have shared my wildness with you. I shared just about everything with you, my dear.

Thankfully I didn’t have the resources to be stuck inside a life that was vacuumed, polished and groomed. So I was forced to find a beautiful home inside myself.

And I have given you the most beautiful parts of my home. And you have internalized them. And so, I am here for you.

And if you need agreement for that from some vacuumed, polished jerk-off or from some light on your fucking ceiling, you need to stop what you’re doing and turn off the lights and sit in your own darkness until you see the flicker inside of you.

Me: Thank you, Mommy. Happy Birthday.

My Mother: Thank you, my dear.

Me: I miss you so.

My Mother: I miss you, too, my darling. But don’t you worry, your time will come soon enough.

Me: Thanks.

—JLK