I respectfully do not care.

Natalie Maines was pouring out of my car speakers this morning and there you were. There we were. I looked right and saw you there, window down, hand thrown open, hair flying in furious tornados of itself, the air hot and sticky, even in the dark. Is it now or is it then? Is there a difference? You don't ask where we're going. I don't know anyway. Just in the opposite direction of that house; that town. We don't talk. We don't explain. We don't question. We don't alter. We sing. And we are. It's enough.  Sometimes the hot tears in my eyes still startle me. They're encroaching on a memory that wasn't theirs before. I wonder when and where that exact moment exists - when our happy, carefree, movie reel memories become the things that break our hearts. 

I am 40 years old with a mother who does not believe me. She does not believe my existence. She does not believe my life laid bare before her. She doesn't believe my words. She doesn't believe my flesh in front of her. I've spent my entire existence explaining myself. Showing myself. Writing myself. Dancing myself. Playing myself into pianos and disappearing with their silence. I am not what she expected or wanted, though God knows I bent myself in unspeakable ways to become it.   No matter how many times I converse with friends, relatives, or therapists about all that my mother cannot or will not be for me, I can't force myself to stop hoping for a different outcome. It's infuriating. I AM infuriating. I cannot stand myself when I'm hurt by things I already know to be true.

How many of me are there? Hundreds, it would seem. So many that I drown in their memories, clothes, songs, hair colors, musings and perfumes. Are any of them me at all? Are they all me?  They're all fractals of me, gleaned through the lenses of every person who has ever passed through me. And yet, not one of them is just me. The me I entered this world as. She is lost. Not wholly. I can hear her sometimes; smell her others...but I can't get to her.