Invisible Snowflakes

 

Invisible Snowflakes

 

My mother wrote a lot when I was young. She taught me about what it was that she did, told me secrets about it. Short sentences. Straight to the point. She wrote a screenplay while I was a teenager, while I was becoming a woman. It was her very first and she took a long time writing it; perfecting small technical details, stripping excess content, re-imagining her dream. 

In movies we decide fates, and we enjoy the unraveling of lives. Comedy, tragedy, iniquity… we love that. In real life, it hurts like hell. I was fortunate in my understanding of life from a different perspective. My behind-the-scenes view has kept some darkness at bay.

It happened to be close to my own life, this semi-autobiographical movie-to-be. It didn't deviate from my mother’s specific rules for desirable content. Write what everyone can relate to. Write what people want to relate to. Common failures at adulthood, which bring all of us to the brink on our darkest nights, were smartly and sequentially mounting as they became triumphant over all.  Responsibility comes in time. Then you have perfect love and tons of money.

Like the protagonist, I was a young mother, single and struggling. And the story lay before the happily ever after. Because, you see, even happy endings do not make heartaches disappear. Dickens did well to expose the error we make in believing in happy endings. Yet, the fact that life is filled with misfortunes can be tolerated, even conquered, by positive expectations.

In her story, the heroine returns to the small town where she lived before her life took off. A rags to riches story, if you will. There is love, there is loss. Most of the things she suffered I suffered. I moved. I lost. Grieving, I was alone. I worked hard and I was under appreciated. Blah, blah, blah. But those are the things that are easier lived if we could have the assurance that there still lies out there a happily ever after.

How much does it help to think of life, when it is hard, as having already been written? How much do we need in order to keep moving forward, full of possibility?  Many things we look back at, that should be monumental, do not hold the place closest to our hearts. Sometimes it is the time we took in that moment ... that’s art. 

One year, when my husband came home with me, before he left and before he passed away, when it was Christmas, when it was very cold outside, late, late at night, when everyone else was home in bed, we were all sneaking around outside when the hour had rendered us criminals, and we shivered in delight.  We were all out on the strip, which has since been stripped itself, torn down and put up new and beautiful, (There's that happy ending!) There was dirt then. A smut store, a strip club, the pizza place that hadn't been changed in years with carpet over linoleum or linoleum over carpet, who could tell? Worn and black with tar of the earth. Plywood booths and fast and heavy swinging bathroom doors, That was my favorite place. A fantastic Hollywood burger joint, a tattoo parlor. The familiar oriental rug store, and a very affluent antique store with a then new building across the street. A bright spot. That night we sat on the antique dealer’s property in someone's future gazebo.

Late at night, the sky dark, (if there were stars maybe they were all being swallowed by that darkness).  In the stillness an occasional intruder made our hearts beat fast.  Four or five of us, maybe drinking, now smoking cigarettes, in a Christmas light lit, gazebo, white rod iron twisting and turning around us, sitting on slim white benches. The smoke and the steam from our breath made magic puffs in the chilled air, like whispering clouds. We said little between the silence, or else we joked and laughed in fullness of spirit. And we were glad to sit and not be made to go. We were all still so young. I remember it like a vision, inside a globe, with snowflakes most likely not there, invisible to the eye but not to the mind. The magic of winter is that it sparkles with dazzling memories.

That quiet night is kind of a metaphor for things as they are now. Those wondrous flakes, that are invisible but always possible, haunting in the magic of beautiful moments, like those who were there but are now gone. Between the stillness and the quiet, when we still look for these moments, those who have left us can be seen, and we stay a little longer, a little quieter, to feel their presence there, always invisible, but always possible, perhaps floating by like imaginary snowflakes.