Ephemerality and Its Kitchen

To my daughter, 

I’ve been thinking about ephemerality. Some kind of ephemerality that cycles through its hosts and ultimately discards them for one more able to carry on. And this happens over and over again.

I’m writing this letter at the kitchen table of my apartment. This place is haunted. Pictures fall off the walls and it feels strange when I’m alone. I’ve become familiar with delusions of light footsteps in the kitchen. On bad nights, I look over my shoulder a lot. Sometimes I even act like a ghost would. I make little noise and feel like I have some excruciating sadness to bear. I feel lighter in my body and heavier in my heart. As I’m writing this, it’s getting dark out. When it gets too quiet for me to stand, I will put a record on. I’ll probably move into my bedroom soon after that. I’m 19. Your birth is probably a decade or so off. 

I know I’ll have a daughter. I can hear you on those nights. You will be the mother of my heart and the angel of my grave. 

You will make my heart something entirely new. It will be reborn just after you are. From that moment on, it will scream and cry when it’s away from you, and it will miss you so intensely when you’re not with it. It will love you as much as anything could love a figurative mother. I am afraid it will eventually begin to silently resent you at no fault of your own. It may lay in bed for lengths at a time and scream and cry for reasons unknown. It may even pretend it's dead and begin to hear footsteps in the kitchen. I’m sorry.

You will be proof of my own mortality. I will pour myself into you till my glass is bone dry. Those bones will be buried in the graveyard of some quaint town and hopefully, like an angel, you will descend upon me when you can make time. Perhaps it will be on the anniversary of when I will have been ultimately discarded. Or maybe it will just be some random day in January when everything is cold and you’re not feeling as able as usual. I’m sorry.

I hope you’ll look like me. I hope that one random day in August I’ll see you and I’ll be so scared. I will stand there and I will slowly sink into the earth beneath our blessed home’s foundation and I will lay there. It will make my heart feel like January. I will be somberly happy and horrifically melancholy. At that moment, it will have already been done. Once I rise I will move like a ghost into my vacant bedroom and stare at myself in the mirror and at the dust rapidly collecting on it. I will lose track of time. I will begin to hear footsteps in the kitchen, and I will pray they don’t get louder. If I have to look over my shoulder I will cry. I’m sorry. 

You will be so beautiful. I will mourn myself. I’m 19, and there is nothing I can do to stop it. It has taken hold and I see it on my mother’s face when I walk into the kitchen. It has already been done.