I feel like a fool reading the writing that came from me before you left.
Ramblings of a naive, freshly heartbroken teen, a sad angsty girl lost in a sea of her own selfishness. I wonder if you felt the same when you wrote at my age. Whether the words poured out of you through unintelligible handwriting spread across great plains of spiral spines, or if they got caught in red wine bottlenecks with the same long, narrow elegance as your fingers.
I still can’t read your handwriting. There are infinite pages piled where you have put things down, only for me to be unable to pick them back up. I am a child again, struggling to interpret slopes and curves and slants where I should be seeing you. In your irrefutable absence, I feel like a failed archaeologist - tools digging into my hands but no knowledge of how to unearth the treasures you have buried for me beneath the dirt.
I wish I could read your handwriting.
I wish I could transcribe every incomprehensible thing you ever wrote down into a leather-bound encyclopedia of Marian.
Intricate lists, disembodied limbs of poems, endless birthday card x’s, scattered college study notes, minute annotations in dog-eared books, unsent application forms, phone numbers on unopened envelopes, lazy scribbles on overdue bills, haphazard signatures, scathing letters threatening to finally leave him.
I would piece together every surface you put pen to and collage each crumpled scrap until the rustles resembled the warm crackle of your voice in my ear again.
Until the fragments formed the shape of your furrowed brow and tightened lips and the way your middle finger picked at the skin of your thumb when you were deep in the trenches of your thoughts at the kitchen table late at night.
When I was 6 years old and you would drift away from me into your own silent orbit even though you held my small hand in yours, and I would have to be the one to tug you back down to earth - begging you to stop thinking out loud because I could never translate the shapes your face made at that age.
I think about the depths at which we would have understood each other if we had been given more years together.
How my burgeoning womanhood would have connected us more than we had ever been since those nine months you carried me inside your belly. The tangled strings of my 20-something missteps and the knots they have birthed that only you can unravel. Instead, I am weaving myself a blanket with patchwork stitches just as gently intertwined as your own complex calligraphy.
One truth I know in my bones was your penchant for writing. How effortlessly good at it you were. You tore through notebooks and pads and journals and newspaper margins like parting multicoloured seas.
You would find refuge in the back pages of my schoolbooks without thinking I would uncover them. I would flip to the back of a yellowed aisling copybook to see your sketched out babblings during class, filling my fourth class self with a frustration I couldn’t understand yet.
I wondered what they meant. What you thought when you wrote them. Why I couldn’t understand. How the notes were never addressed to me but to some other phantom reasoning kept safe inside your head, shielding me from what kept you up at night.
You never thought twice about whether your thoughts were good enough to put into existence. You never faltered for fear of judgement. Perpetually unafraid. Unabashedly Marian.
I have learned that this is where my fear must have rooted. This inherent dread that should I turn the key, the floodgates will unfasten and I will be pulled under the perennial riptides of grief - your hand no longer holding mine to tug me back to the surface.
So it is easier to stay on dry land. To watch the black waves dance as my feet melt into the sand, safe in the knowledge that at any moment, my legs still have the power to turn and walk away.
I do not have to wait for rain. It still comes when I ask it not to.
Each drop a tender tap on my shoulder, tears racing in rivulets to see who can carry the most salt before collecting in my concave heart.
Some days you are a violent mist. Others, a soothing deluge.
I will continue to etch your words onto the paper of my skin and trace the shapes of your thoughts into my heavy bones. I will allow time to embed the lines of your face into my own for all the ages you never got to be.
I read about microchimerism: a phenomenon revealing that not only do mothers contribute inherited DNA to their children - they also pass along fully formed cells that continue functioning for years within their childrens bodies.
This information was not news to me.
My skin already held the knowledge that you exist within it still. That I carry the grace of your profile in the bump of my nose. That the corners of your lips lift mine when I smile. That your voice reverberates beneath when my head is thrown back in laughter. That your fingers interlace my knuckles when I am writing.
I will continue to breathe life into the cells you have given me. I will speak to them on the days I wish you would pick up the phone. When I plunge the coffee. When I wash my face. When I tie my shoes. When I am walking home and all I can see is sky and the spaces you no longer occupy.
I will speak to them forever, so that you will never die.
I will keep digging through the mountains of your manuscripts to teach myself the nuances of your alphabet. I will unfold the hidden meanings you tucked between the pages. I will decipher all those big and small and loud and passing thoughts you brought into being over those 61 years you existed in this universe.
I will relearn the feel and sound of each letter in my mouth through the tips of my fingers the way you showed me when you first taught me how to read halfway up the stairs of our little Dublin house. I will trace the shapes all the way back to the memories we weren’t allowed to make.
I will write until the years have slowly carved your handwriting into mine.
Until the skin on my hands begins to crease the way yours had just begun to. Until my loops slant and my curves sway and all earthly logic and order has been removed from the page until nothing but biro constellations remain.
Until it is incomprehensible to anyone but you.
Martha Lovett Cullen is a writer, director and producer from Dublin, who has performed her poetry at various open mics over the years. Addressing personal subjects within her work, Martha enjoys exploring the emotional complexities of life, investigating the impact different relationships and experiences have on how we learn and grow as human beings.