by skin of young girls, and touched some of his daughters. Skin. Touch.
I cried when I've heard that part of our family story. So it's in the genes. Another uncle committed suicide, and a nephew. Why did she keep that secret about her father and his issues untill she was old and at the end of her life ? She said to me because it was not a pleasant story to hear, and she wanted to erase it and forget it.
I came back at our new office a few days later. My team thought I was upset by the new headquarters. I wasn't. I was just desperate, as my boyfriend left me without any explanation. Being here at the moment when I was the most vulnerable, playing the role of the father and brother and lover. He disappeared after we had a diner together with my best friends. That night he told us the story of his son disappearing one year, with just a bag and no explanation, and the police refusing to look for him as he was over eighteen, then an adult, and he had taken his bag. I spent hours crying.
Now, I think he came back to see his wife and find back his comfortable life. The big house of a trader, the swimming pool, the billard and the big parties in week-ends with all friends and the family. He needs it. He's born to be happy, I was the break in the darkness, the intense adventure in another world, intellectual and demanding. I'm not educated for being happy. Sometimes, I would love it. Be nice and light. Enjoy life in the present. Forgetting my roots and all family secrets that nearly killed me.
Someone said to me you need to die for being born again. What is the limit of diying, that is the question. I need to eat again, I'm too skiny. I need to sleep and without pills as making me call my ex boyfriends, even the ones I don't want to see, or connect on Facebook to my boyfriend's wife, not such a good idea when I wake up in the morning. I'm obsessed by what he's doing at the moment.
So, I came back at the new office. And I had a lot in my head. Suddenly, looking at the window, I saw the balloon, the same one that my father was looking at, dying in the modern hospital, looking back at the mess of his life. He managed to smooth it at the end.
I don't believe in god, neither in a life after our life, but I believe in signs. When I want to talk to my father now, I write a letter, I read it loudly and then I burn it. Words are said, I can move forward. Today is the birthday of my brothers' death.
I've been worse than that. Even if always a painful moment of the year for me.
As people say, "Don't worry. Be happy". I'd like to see my nephews. I'm a little scared of children, my latest boyfriend helped me to have great moments with them, I should try seeing them. One day, they'll be adults. I'd like to have share moments with them before it occurs.
Annecy May 2015
The weird house
My mother is at the third floor now. When I came to visit her, new friends of her said to me : "Be careful, never go to the third floor." I asked why, nobody answered. An old woman put her finger in front of our mouth, and whispered saying :" Shut up, shhhhh, it's a secret."
I was like in a fairy tale with characters that give you clues to understand the wiseness behind, but never say it all.
One week-end when I came, a wheel chair with a woman with white long hair and in pajamas was in the middle of the hall. One of the guest of the house took her for a ballade but forgot her. She was peaceful, looking at the people, it took one hour for a nurse to see something was wrong and to take her back to her room.
One week later, the doctor called to say they needed my mother to be at the third floor. When I asked why, they said she disappeared every two days in the street, and could be hurt and be lost. What is the third floor ? I had images of the movie with Jack Nicholson, where he struggles against tough methods making them crasy or even more so, and also Fire Island with L Di Caprio that plays a role where we think he investigates and indeed his one of the patients.
The third floor, you can't go without a code. That's it. She in a prison that looks as paradise to her : a small space, tv shows, nice faces and people taking care of her. She hates being alone, and she's happy, even when someone is lost in the night and tries to open her door, missing his one on the same floor.
She even sings in the morning. She never sang in her all life from what I know.
From time to time, when I sit with her for the tea, I see she's sad. The other day she said to me she had no news from my brother and his new family (he's divorced).
He lives in Guyane. For Eastern fest, they called, and she was like a young lady waiting for her love, sparkle in the eyes she never had before, to listen three minutes her grand children, far away somewhere on the planet. I could hear their laughs in the phone, and we could nearly see the sun and the sea. It made her day.
I spent Xmas with my mother. It was the first one without my father, and I did it for him, for her, and for me, I would have felt guilty to spend the night with friends or just with Kate on our bed in the beautiful bedroom decorated with japanese estamps, listening to Marianne Faithfull or the Stones and the cat jumping to play.
The main room was full of noises, and brightly lighed. We took a table for four with another guy like me, taking care of his father, I supposed he was gay but I don't know.
The lights were really strong like neons which gave us a green and yellow skin.
There were twelve tables, big ones and small ones, not all of them had visitors, but the room was full of the excitement of the moment, decorated with fake snows on windows, and golden stars in paper on the table, some of the guests helping others to eat.
My mother was obsessed by the bottle of wine, she didn't want it. She said to the big black girl taking care of our table : "Please take it back". We said to her with my friend for the evening that we wanted to drink some. So she left it, but repeated the same sentence to the black girl five minutes later. I finally understood she was upset as thinking paying for it and not drinking it. I reinsured her that all was included in the expenses of the house, and in the menu.
At our table, the young man explained to me he was moving to London and trying to sell his beautiful piano, but nobody now purchases a huge piece like that, people want the good quality of sound, and the same time a small size. The guy said to him ; "It's the end of a period, people don't purchase any longer secondary houses, they buy a ticket for another capital in Europe for a few euros, or rent an appartment for a few days, or even pay for a prestige hotel, they don't want the burden and the constraints of maintaining their house."
What that potential buyer was explaining was true for our elders. I never thought having my mother at home, even with someone taking care of her during the day. It would have been a nightmare, and my friend would never have accepted it.
Trying to make me smile, as my gloomy thoughts could be seen on my face, my friend for the diner showed to me a "carnet de note", on which he wrote any funny sentence invented by his old father.
One of them was : "I will make them feel whose the boss", or "Let's go to the playa", especially knowing they never came to the beach when they were a family. He's father studying laws and books even during vacations, and leaving them in teen agers camps.
My mother's preferred sentence now is : "Don't you think life is beautiful." And she sings.
She was a strict, and we must admit a boring mother, without any conversation, and never expressing any emotion, to think that things could move my mother, make her feel happy to be alive was new to me.
I remember a letter where she was expressing to me that I needed to be nurturing myself in a better way, as she found a candy in one of my jacket left at home. The letter was two pages. At the end, my father wrote just before putting it in the envelop : "I ate the candy, it was a red strawberry with sugar, I liked it."
My mother has erased of her mind the bad moments, when we were in the closed room in the dark, because she said we were nasty children as twins. She did it so many times, leaving us alone in the small space, with the heating just near our heads, like a potential danger. She wasn't mean, she was just crasy, an unaware mother, deliberately leaving them in the fear.
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br /> I never talked to her about my childhood. I'm nearly fifty years old now, and I believe the generation of our parents did a lot of harm. It's not their fault. It's their education. They were raised during the second worldwide war. A strict education. I don't have any children. I didn't want any human being to have the weight of my own education. We try to improve, but did you notice how we are tense ? We want to control situations. It's deep inside us. Else we become crasy. When will we let it go ?
My worst moment in my life with my parents has been when I've told them I was gay. My mother never accepted it and asserted to me : "It's because you live in the capital. The major is gay. So he has a bad influence on people." I was feeling so bad, and far from them : who I was, what mattered to me, what my daily life was.
I suppose one day or another we'll be as she is. Forgetting the past, forgetting the constraints and duties, and our fear to be seen as different. Suddenly discovering who we are, as children, with the joy of discovering new things, small gestures, the light in the curtains and their moving with the warm wind, the water on the floor shining as a mirror, the white corridor pure as snow, the blue uniform of people always busy like bees, the program on tv with animals