Drinker of Ink

by Shannon Castleton

And, though she confessed it to me only once, she would like to experience homesickness, to have me wake her from a dream during which she is smiling, and I could ask, “What was your dream about?” so that she could sigh and whisper, “Iowa.” Or Manhattan, I guess, if she had switched lives with me. And she would like to experience just once what it’s like to have a parent call almost every day.

Why is attraction a mix of elation and sickness for me?

mon coeur

I’m not sure he tiptoes around anything. I think he likes to say what he means. I think I like him to say what he means. You could say, Peter, are you feeling unwell today? and however he answered, you’d believe him.

Before she had cancer, she would sometimes tell Luc and me how she had wanted more children—a brood of chortling French Catholics passing a deep pot of cassoulet around her table. “But then we would have been trop gros for Manhattan,” she’d inevitably say, reaching her arms out. Too big. “And God knew the Lebruns would be sad not to live in New York.” Luc and I would giggle, basking in the undivided sunlight of her attention, oblivious to the loss she might have felt every day. But if she did feel a loss, few could have guessed it. Back then, she wasn’t so reserved. She would cuddle Luc and me in our beds and sing, help our little hands shape pastry. On walks, she would drill us in English and French. She made motherhood a purpose-driven, tender endeavor that I revered as the highest vocation.

when I was ten, Maman and I babysat our friend Genevieve’s baby, who at one point required a bath. I stripped right down and hopped into the water, smoothed the baby girl’s bald head with a cloth, rubbed the baby soap on her legs and belly. Maman said, “Vivienne! You are so good with infants. You could grow up to be a cardiologist for children—you could save lives.” To which I said, “Or I could be a mother like you, who loves giving baths to my babies.” Maman smiled at me, blinking, a long time.

“I think you make people brighter, Viviun.” Robert distracted me from the scene in my head with words that sounded almost like poetry.

Love, I have never been loved the way I want you to love me—

This is such a small moment, housed in such a small space, but it will spin like a planet in my memory.

Rumpled and weary, he struck me as an earnest farmer again—a modern-day version of Thomas Hardy’s Gabriel Oak, who would look a woman in the eye and say, “Whenever you look up, there I shall be—and whenever I look up, there you shall be.”

Now, at this moment, my hands are in Peter’s. I think he is looking as baffled as I am. Well, I must look awestruck. He’s baffled. The point is that our skin is deliberately touching. The point is that he touched me deliberately.

“It is terrifying to be a parent. To choose to behave one way with your child, and then watch what comes of it. It is like planting a garden with aster and dynamite, but you never know which, and either sprouts up at the oddest times to remind you of what you did well or poorly.”

“this is a thing you can have right here. This is your life right now. It might be both happy and sad, but where there’s happiness—like, good, bright happiness—you take it.” I

MAMAN Maman is French, like pastry and ballet. She teaches me to bake crackly bread— “Soft with your fingers! Softly,” she says. At night, she sings “Une chanson douce.” Je veux la chanter pour toi. Her fingers tickle my arms. She is so soft. She likes the park in April, swans and walks to museums and libraries. Sometimes she takes my hand. Sometimes she says, “You know the way,” and she follows me. She makes sure I arrive there safely.

The present we live in vanishes before we blink, let alone write it down in ink.

How is she becoming so real when she is not even viable outside Maman’s womb yet? She hasn’t breathed air, and still I would grieve to lose her. Already I love her. Already I imagine braiding her hair, singing her songs, reading her poems at bedtime.

think I want nothing more than that—to be a mother, I mean. And

I know that kind of maternal yearning makes me a miserable feminist, but maternity is what I want—the same way I want nourishment and shelter. Every other thing I wish for radiates from that desire.

From the first breath of this journal, I have wanted to fly home, and now that I am, I don’t feel as though I’m leaving a place I dislike as much as I’m leaving a person I don’t want to be—a scared girl so frail, other humans do not dare speak the truth to her.

The past is never where you think you left it.

to write is to allow pain and love and memory and time to exist outside yourself. You breathe when the words are out. You can live until tomorrow.

“I know I love you, Mary Anna O’Brien O’Connor, because even ten millennia with you would not be even almost long enough.”