The Note
Published in the June 2006 Taj Mahal Review
….and the note beside the body said, "Never mind".
She lay there in a state of quiet peace, not seeming to be traveling at the speed of life into death. She looked to have folded her arms across her breasts and slipped into sleep. Her lips held only the hint of a smile.
Beside the note on the motel bedside table lay her passport and driver's license. As though she had thought it out carefully and didn't want to cause any more trouble than necessary when she was found.
She was a pretty woman. Not like a model. There were tiny scars on her face. One on her chin from a fall that caused her two front teeth to fall out when she was three, one on her right cheekbone from the horn of a baby goat she'd gotten in the way of when she was five.
She was an Aries, an April baby whose weak part of the body was her head. A look into her medical records would show that at the age of fifteen she had been in a terrible auto accident which cracked her skull, leaving her in a coma for three days. This resulted in two subsequent bouts of Bell's Palsy, where the left side of her face sagged, and she had to wipe spittle from the corners of her mouth.
Still, she had long, luxurious dark hair and large hazel eyes and a palpable attitude which leapt from the passport picture as if to say, "Hi, there! I'm pretty hot and you'd better not mess with me".
She and her mother had a rocky but honest relationship based on love and mutual respect. There had been several years after the auto accident during which she was buried in the drug world of Los Angeles. Times of which she herself had no memory, but which had forced her mother to practice what is tactfully known as "Tough Love". Sometimes she saw evidence of the agony of the memory of those years in her mother's face. She knew that there was a lot of guilt attached to those times. Guilt made all the worse because to have not done the guilty deeds would likely have resulted in her death. Ironic, in that the death now proved to be unavoidable.
The two of them spoke often of their "dark thoughts"; those dips to visions of suicide to which they seemed to have been born. They found themselves on parallel courses where life was on the one hand exciting, exhilarating and limitless and the next moment a minefield where the wrong step would blow their worlds to pieces. They wondered at an existence in which other people seemed to live dull and safe lives literally without a thought.
They spoke of God and Heaven and Hell and whether or not those things existed. They spoke of telling truth no matter what and of living lives of integrity and grace. They tried very hard to understand why the world was such a punishing place for those who are different.
They talked and talked and then, the night before, when they had exhausted all other possibilities, they had made a pact. They decided that when they could no longer bear the burden of life, neither of them would hesitate.
Thus, she, the daughter lay in Killeen, Texas with a hint of a smile playing on her cooling lips knowing as she slipped away that on the other side of the country in Burbank, California her mother also lay. And on the motel nightstand were her passport and driver's license.
….and the note beside the body said, "Never mind".
Glenda Glayzer
Barber: Adagio for Strings
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