The Kinda Mom You Were

I miss you mom.

If there is a God, why did God have to take you away the night before Thanksgiving Day on November twenty-one, 2001?

I was only eleven, and if there is a heaven, 

were you listening-in on my weeping?

I was alone in a silent room while the whole family was celebrating Thanksgiving.

My aunt told me to “come out and say hi to the whole family” and that I needed “to move on.”

Nobody seemed to understand or care that you were a struggling heroin addict: thirty years old. 

If there is a Devil, I believe my tears have guarded you from the flames of the Devil.

If you are listening-in mom, I want you to hear some of my last memories I have of you.

You called me on September eleven, 2001, and said intensely,

“the end of the world is coming” and that “they attacked us: the United States!”

You said that your boyfriend said, “we have a laser that we are going to use against them and that it will cause the world to split in half,”

and even though I was scared, because I was always a boy of reason, I said, “that is not true.”

I was certain you were trying to scare me in a playful kinda way. Maybe I was overly serious in my tone.

I did not mean to be.

Then a couple of weeks later, when CPS let me visit you, you ran into the living room and excitedly said, “look what I noticed!”

You showed me a drawing of mine that I did in August, and for a reason I still cannot explain, I wrote the time I drew it: 9:11 p.m., which was unmistakably written in purple in my handwriting.

You looked at me like I would be surprised and scared, and you were right. I was.

But I was a boy of reason and I stayed quiet.

I did not mean to be.

I miss you mom.

I miss when you would read me my tarot cards;

I miss your teachings about numerology and how you believed with all your heart; 

Our teacher showed us a burntblack boxboard that smelled like it was recently on fire & said Alien Zik gave it to her for us kindergarteners.

I miss your psychic games like guess a number one through ten;

I miss when you made a Ouija board out of a block of wood;

You carved the letters of the alphabet with a butcher knife and made that wooden triangle with the carved hole in it;

You, me and my little brother played it in the dark and the wooden triangle moved;

I think you were trying to scare me, but in a playful kind of way;

And you were right,

I was scared.