I am inspired by the hippie movement. The women at Haight and Ashbury with flowers in their hair and psychedelic swirls in their eyes and in their heart. I am inspired by them. When I think about them, I feel a deep and pulling poetic excitement that makes me miss you and makes me want to buy magazines and quit my job and get smarter and smarter. And wash my hair with mayonnaise, cover myself with bells and shells and perfectly fitting jeans with holes in the knees. Bare feet on the cleanest pile of dirt and a seriously sad smile. When I think about them, I want to wear enormous feather earrings, but only if the feathers were found lying in the dirt like a gift from the animal kingdom and from the earth and from the spinning, dizzying heavens.
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When you told me you were going away to boarding school I started listening to this sad song called "Sister" by The Nixons on repeat for hours at a time until my sister barged into my room and turned off my stereo, said she couldn't take it anymore. My mother thought I was sad because my sister was going away to college. But that had never really occurred to me.
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My mom told me Karen Carpenter stopped her own heart by starving herself and inducing vomiting with ipecac syrup. I looked for it in the medicine cabinet. And I wanted this black lace dress with daisies on it from Express for my confirmation but my mom said it was too expensive. So instead I dreamed about it. I still dream about it. Thought about it every night before bed.
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Your mother told you we could take down your blinds and paint them in a tribute to Jerry Garcia but then she woke you up angrily in the morning and made you take them down and wash the paint off, behavior which my own mother likened to the behavior of Joan Crawford as depicted in the tell-all biography Mommie Dearest. And she gave me the book to read. When she dies, you will publish all your mother's angry letters. I will publish a mass of humiliating absence. Burn the rest. She didn't know about the nights when we smoked pot, dyed our hair, listened to church bells. For a long time, thinking about you was the easiest way for me to feel that burning in my chest.