These Dreams of You

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She is two again, as when her other mother with the blue-green hair first came to get her in Ethiopia, and now as then the child is too shackled by loneliness to speak, the child who never has felt loved first and foremost, loved beyond and before anyone else, the child who must compete with other children for love and be always convinced she has lost, who somehow can imagine a blind parental love unconditioned even as she doesn’t yet believe she has known it. Like someone once said of God, if you can imagine such a love then it must exist.

At the center of the maze, when the little girl feels a single tear leak from her eye, she turns in the woman’s arms so no one can see it and so it soaks nothing but the ground beneath them. The girl is too little to know how profound it is to feel nowhere to belong; maybe no one at any age understands feeling grief for what can’t be remembered. But though she barely remembers anymore the world she came from, half of her brief lifetime ago, she knows she never wanted to leave it, that she left part of herself there, so her grief is a secret from herself and until she learns the word for this secret then it’s not a grieving that heals anything.

Then who are you? Molly says to the girl in her arms, and are we really here? Are you who I think you might be, or just who I always hoped you to be but never were? Is my own mother here with us now? Do I hear her wandering the green passages just the turn of a corner away, or does she hear you, mistaking your music for mine? I never called you by a name except once — but is it yours? and do you need one? Or is it just I who need for you to have one?