The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch Page B

because someone molested them or because they were poor or pregnant or even because they put needles in their arms or pills in their mouths or weed in their lungs or alcohol down their ever-constricting throats. They were the saddest girls I have ever met because every one of them had it in her to lose a shot at a self and become her mother.
    My rage became nuclear. But I did my time. I exited the program with a certificate. I wanted to punch my mother - my mother the puffy hypocrite, the woman currently putting away a fifth of vodka a day - in the face. But she was the same woman who would sign the signature on my scholarship papers a year later. So I did not punch my mother’s mouth off of her face. I just thought this: get out. Hold your breath until you can leave. You are good at that. Perhaps the best. This woman’s pain could kill you.
    Later in life, after I flunked out of college, I lived alone in Austin in a crappy-ass efficiency off of the freeway. I got into some more trouble living on my own that led to another round of mandatory drug and alcohol counseling for six weeks in a very strange basement of a medical clinic serving underprivileged folks. Poor people, Mexicans, unwed mothers, African Americans, and me.
    There, I was meant to “find meaning in life’s traffic through clearing spiritual barriers.” A different healing slogan. More self righteous hypocritical Christians. There was even a woman in my sessions named “ Dorothy.” My mother’s name. Or The Wizard of Oz . I did my time there too, and left with yet another certificate.
Trust me when I say I definitely found “meaning in life’s traffic.” Eventually.
    So then this is not an addiction story.
    It’s just that I have a sister who walked around for nearly two years when she was 17 with razor blades in her purse seeing if she could outlive the long wait waiting to get out of family.
    Her first round.
    It’s just that I had a mother who ate a whole bottle of sleeping pills at middle age with only her daughter the swimmer at home to witness the will of it.
    Her first round.
    I know that will well now. It’s the will of certain mothers and daughters. It comes from living in bodies that can carry life or kill it.
    It’s the will to end.

Crooked Lovesong
    PHILLIP DID WRITE ME A SONG. HE DID. AND IT WASN’T about how my life was spiraling away from bold swimmer toward comfortably numb. It wasn’t about the three abortions I’d had before I was 21. It wasn’t even about how much money I’d won drinking Texans under tables. Or all the nights I made him break into other peoples’ homes the way my father had broken into me.
    The song he wrote for me was mostly instrumental. But you have to understand, and my archangel and his lover will back me up on this - he could play the acoustic guitar better than … you know, James Taylor. So the song took on a rather epic quality. Way before Windham Hill. But there was one, small, tender refrain that would come out of nowhere, or rather, it would come from the very heart of the music, deeper than anything I’d known, and it went like this: Children have their dreams to hang on to. How they fly, and take us to the moon. They flow from you. They flow from you.
    The first time I heard it? Sitting on a driftwood log at our wedding, which was on the beach of Corpus Christi, Texas. And it wasn’t just me who couldn’t breathe from the jesusfucking - christknot in my throat and the salted water pouring out of my eyes rivaling the ocean. The whole posse of people there bawled. Nothing nothing nothing nothing about me deserved it. But very deep down in me, very tiny, very afraid, was a girl who smiled from within the cavernous place I’d hidden her.
    Is that love? Was it? I still don’t know. It’s possible. But none
of us are any good at naming it. It comes and then goes. Like songs do. I do know this: it’s the kind of thing that happens in stories.
    Phillip and I tried to make a go of it as