My Cardboard Balcony

Transatlantic Mourning by Belinda Roddie Two hours before I was set to fly from one side of the world to the other, I received a call from my father, of all people, who told me that my mother had died. She had been in her garden, pruning roses. Pink roses, like the ones her own mother always grew. The doctors said she went quickly and without pain. I think the pain skipped her altogether and went straight to us in a brand new, raw, pulsing form. I still boarded that plane, and I still felt the Mediterranean air on my face, and I still tasted salt on the breeze while feeling it in my eyes. I drank ouzo with old friends and family, took pictures of the pyramids, and sailed a boat out toward Italy, wearing a flat straw hat. I pretended my mother was there with me. She had wanted to accompany me on an adventure one day. I imagined her sitting in that vessel beside me, giggling beneath a floral bandana, hiding her eyes, blue as mine, behind oversized sunglasses,

We were told we were supposed to rise up together. We were told we were supposed to take a stand. We were given pens and pieces of paper and expected to write our own national anthems. We were loaded down with brushes and canvas and relied on for brand new protest slogans. When we painted pictures on walls and overpasses, they were meant to have a deeper meaning. But we are hollow inside. We have no other deeper meaning but the artificial one you have scrawled onto our arteries.