My mother mourns old houses.
For every decrepit home we passed she would lean forward in her seat as if to see better. Take her foot off the gas and hang, suspended with the car, as she took it in. At first, I wasn't sure what she saw in them. They were old to me, tattered and forgotten, the civilized equivalent of a skeleton in a forest. Regardless, she would sit back in her seat and return her eyes to the road. And, as if in goodbye, she would say,
"somebody loved you once."
For every grand old house we passed with torn curtains in the windows and perennials in the garden beds, she would repeat her mantra. And for every bone I found in the woods, I would struggle to understand. I would take it in my hands, turn it back and forth, examine the gaping eye sockets and forest growth, looking for decaying fences and a broken front door. I held it up to my face, peered into its blindness, tried the words out on my tongue.
"Somebody loved you."
Inevitably, I could never say it like my mother could. I could never find the overgrown shrubbery and ivy choked windows. So I would tuck the bones under my arm and traipse home to put it beside the others.
I started seeing the perennials, the collapsed dog houses in the yard, when I began raising pets on my own. I no longer had to share them, divvy up naming privileges with my siblings and my parents and the uncle we haven't seen in two months. I could feed them mealworms, arrange driftwood in their tank, pick fresh brussel sprouts for them. And, in my own goodbye, I could say "I love you." It was not like my mother's. It was no longer somebody, a mysterious figure as tattered and worn as the houses. It was no longer a thought in passing, a dismissal.
"Somebody loved you, but they are gone now".
It was a promise. Tangible, honest, and twining its way through the filter in the fish tank, into flipped over ears, pressed against soft noses like a preserved flower.
"Maybe somebody loved you once, but I love you now."
