Excerpt

I sat there that night alone like I had sat in so many other places on as many a clear night. Everyone I asked had other plans, other people or other lives. It was just me, a stale camp chair that reeked like vomit and a tall bag of pine boughs I had pruned off a dying shrub in the front yard. I had eaten too much again and felt swollen but I was ravenous still. That was in the days when I could never get full of enough of anything to quiet the longing for more. Only memories seemed safe enough to count on then.
The pine boughs were too fresh and lent more smoke to the air than flame to the fire but I couldn’t seem to mind. It was the day after June ended in a heat wave. July brought in a welcomed breeze that lifted the sweet, sticky smell of sap into the air and down through my lungs. It was like smoking Christmas in July.
I was not supposed to be alone that night. Though I had known for some time that company did nothing to insure against my loneliness, I had hoped for a distraction. Without it my mind went to where it always went. My mother had been dead for almost ten years by then but I still held silent séances in the checkout lines of grocery stores praying she’d show me the sign of a balanced meal. It wasn’t the holiday that made me miss my mother. The ache was a constant vibration in me. It was small things like sea shells, Coke cans or the color mauve that struck the fork at the core of me.
Since the 1930’s people have been burying cherished things in the ground and digging them up decades later to see if they still cherish them. My mother was my time capsule. Her ashes are buried beneath a stone in her hometown. In those days, I still held onto the idea that I could dig them up, water them and rediscover my childhood, my innocence, my sense of safety, and my mother.
That night I wept into my hands for the child in my heart, for my mother’s sisters, for my unborn niece and her father. Long after the pine boughs ran out and the flames sputtered down to still coals, I sat and blamed the smoke for the salt on my cheeks and wailed the low, long broken cries of a man with a hole in his soul.

(from Passing: Memoire of a Nobody)