Work Text:
Dear Mom,
As of today, I have officially lived 384 months. Of those, you only got to witness the first eighteen. In that time we got a lot of twos: birthdays, Halloweens, Christmases. I would know. I found pictures once while digging through the attic in our old house. It's funny. I have no memory of you, yet the déjà vu I felt as I shuffled through the stack of old Polaroids I'd found was almost palatable.
Maybe that's why Dad has never liked talking about you. Once we do, you seem so much closer than you actually are.
I may not remember that short time we spent together, but I do remember what we didn't. Throwing a tantrum when Dad tried to leave me at school for my first day of kindergarten and then bawling again on the last day before summer break when it was time to go home. That Thanksgiving where Dad and I both got the flu and we had to push off our celebration with the Thomases until the following weekend. My first trip to Disney World when I was eight where I met every single princess.
My wedding is just one more event you're going to miss.
Salt stung the corners of Mary Anne's eyes. Her pen slipped from her shaking hand and fell to the worn wooden desk below with a clack. Though tears clouded her vision, she could still see the sheet of paper beneath her well enough that she could easily pick it up and wad it into a ball. Why not? Even if she were to again put pen to paper, she'd only be speeding up the inevitable. If she didn't drop it into a wastepaper basket now, then it'd surely find its way there in the future after a decade or so spent tucked away in a drawer.
Even if her mother could somehow read it, it wasn't as if she could reply.
Even if all her other friends failed to RSVP, this was the only invitation that she could never mail.
Mary Anne's throat tightened. As she'd watched her daughter and Kristy crawl along the carpet, had she ever imagined that one day the two would be walking down the aisle together? In her final moments, had her mother truly been able to grasp the true extent of everything that she would never experience?
Mary Anne wrapped her arms around her chest and hugged herself.
It wasn't her mother's fault. Yet all the logic and reason in the world, let alone letters, couldn't fill the hole where her mother should have been. An emptiness that only reared its ugly head when the future was shining brightest with possibility, when she couldn't possibly miss sight of it.
Finally scrounging together enough money so that she and Kristy could buy their first home, getting a new kitten so that Eeyore could have a friend, finishing her master's - whatever lay ahead in the future, the only thing certain was who wouldn't be there. Not in person anyway. It was one thing to see her mother in old photos, to feel her presence in the paintings and dolls that her grandmother had brought from Idaho. Those were all abstracts, pieces of the past that never quite fit together into a full puzzle. Mary Anne's mind was close to bursting at the seams with "What-Ifs?", questions that no amount of time could ever answer.
Mary Anne sniffled and rubbed her eyes. Once her breathing had steadied, she grabbed her pen and quickly uncapped it.
Dad and Grandma asked this many times, so I guess it's only fair that I raise the question too: Why? Why should you have to miss this?
Maybe if she asked it enough - aloud or on paper - then she might finally get an answer.