Journey into My Imagination
Chapter Seventeen: Coming Home Eight months later, when I brought my baby home from the hospital, waiting in the living room of our house was a party. Stevie was there. Momma had gone back to California. Jessie was there with Willa and Kathleen Lucinda, their baby girl. Cleo was there with Jaques, her paramour as... Continue Reading →
I knew for sure that this time I had lost my best friend and the only love of my life. I spent the next few weeks crying all the time. I couldn’t eat and I couldn’t sleep. I guess it was around the time that I started to get sick that Grammy wrote to momma. She must have because soon enough I got a postcard from her stating simply, “I’m coming home.”
In August I made a portrait of my parents. I had pushed them to the back of my mind until then. I hadn’t heard from momma in over a year. I didn’t even know if I had the right address. It wasn’t until I made that portrait that I realized that I wanted to get in contact with her. I had painted them as they once were, or I tried to. But when I looked at the painting, I realized that my father’s eyes were guarded as if even the painting was holding secrets that it would never tell. My mother’s eyes were tired and wary like she was afraid of being hurt.
“I hate that you have to go Cleo. I feel like all the important people I have in my life just leave me one by one.”
“See ya around, Ice Princess.”
He climbed into the taxi, and it began to pull away, but then it stopped. He opened the door and for an instant I wondered if he had second thoughts. But he just added, “Hey Cinder?” “Yeah?” “Do me a favor and find out the truth about daddy
There wasn’t anything she couldn’t accomplish if she set her mind to it. It seemed to me though if you tried to capture her spirit or hold her too close, she would fly off into the night on a pair of gossamer wings. You couldn’t cage her or pigeonhole her. She would not stand to fall to the whim of mediocrity.
Shannon McCauley - Author 