Meaning Only to Save the Baby: Lower East Side, New York, New York 1997

Iris De Ment is singing Our Town and you are washing the Thanksgiving cookware, crying your eyes out for yourself as a twenty year old mother finding that once again I Love You is a prelude to what cannot be considered acts of love. You stumbled off to this life meaning only to save the baby. Moments stolen from long days and half the nights pacing your room with Cat Steven’s Wild Woman as loud as the house could hold. You stalked your life into shape in that room, crying to heaven, sobbing at not knowing how to go on. Mothering your girl. Not letting on you knew not a thing, you could not a thing. 

So frightened, so alone the world around you extended all the way to where ever she was. Beyond that lived danger so powerful you could only perceive it as the loud and muffled sound of nothing drawn by a huge streaking blur with the occasional shoe on the ground. The large part of your energy in those young days was given to breaking through numbing shock to achieve whatever task needed accomplishment to promote your lives. With time so doubly spent you fear you have taken too long to give you and your girl a life you might trust as stable. 

You keep getting distracted. What caused you to write was the outcome of a talk with your grown now girl, the right twist of song, and the time to land back in your young self to re-experience your horror at life and its trick’s. Panicked, alone, desperate, working hard at whatever landed in front of you to find safety. Today you feel safe enough to let her cry her little eyes out.