Horror Films

My mother used to watch horror movies so that when they were over, her life didn’t seem so bad. I remember lying next to her on her chaise lounge the last time I visited. It was where she slept, maybe slightly more comfortable than a road, her feet crossed, her arches high enough to shoot pool through, my own flat feet fidgeting a couple feet away, buried in socks, with my ears plugged so I couldn’t hear the gruesome sounds of murder on the show she insisted we watch.

I could only hear the sound of her laughing at me, demanding I take my damn fingers out of my ears. “Jesus Christ, Jessica, it’s like you’re eight all over again.” But unlike my mother, scary movies never made my life seem better. They only created new worries for what might be in store for me.

I remember the last time my mother went missing. When people go missing for the first time, it’s an emergency. When people go missing every four months for a decade, it gets more annoying. Like being forced to watch a scary movie you’ve already seen but it still shakes you up even though you pretty much remember what’s going to happen.

I called the hospitals. The police. All in between dealing with the dramas of my own life that had nothing specifically to do with her but probably somehow did. Wondering if she’d finally drank herself to death or if she’d met someone special at St. Vincent de Paul’s and eloped.

Turned out, she’d passed out on the floor next to her chaise, how could she have known the difference, several empty bottles nearby, and was taken to the hospital to be pronounced near death.

At the indoor bouncy house in the mall, I waited on my phone to speak with my mother, my sweaty son bouncing up and down, waving at me with one hand, the filthy fingers of the other in his mouth. Finally I heard her voice, sounding like sobering shit. The nurse was helping her sit up, helping her hold the phone. “I am perfectly capable,” I could hear her slur. “I guess nobody told you that I am a member of the Flying Wallendas.”

That was one of the last conversations we had.

I sometimes wonder if my mother stayed in the shadows of her life because going out into the light felt like a place she didn’t belong. It became enough to celebrate the accomplishment of surviving all the things that dragged her down instead of what might have lifted her up.

So tonight, I think about all the people who’ve never had anyone to lift them up or to be their champion, or the people who’ve never believed they were strong enough or amazing enough to lift themselves up and out of their circumstances and into a life that matches their potential.

And I think about those people who are so tired of being fucked over that they root for the pyromaniacs rather than the bridge builders because it’s such a secret relief watching everything go down in flames than feeling badly about all the stuff they always wished they had.