My Lady in Blue

I watch you sitting on the edge of the bed stretching your nude stockings up and over those long smooth legs.

The first one passes right above the dark mole God placed just to the left of your knee, softening the color somewhat when pressed against your pale skin.

I want so badly to reach out and touch it with my five - year - old pointer finger.

It is that perfect circle I learned in kindergarten.

Instead, I sit cross legged on the floor reaching for my own cheek. And there it is, a mole. I begin to trace it round and round; my comforting reminder that we are part of each other even when I'm feeling disconnected or misplaced.

Your perfectly coiffed hair, frosted like delicate summer flowers that never leave when autumn winds come calling, rises high above everyone else.

I've yet to see it move. Breezing in and out with your body through family life, like a postcard of activity, seemingly lost in another time. Before us.

My mind turns you over and over in wonderment at the colorful pieces of you, wedged between storms spread out across my days.

I hand you pink lipstick from the Avon lady who happens to be Penny's mama, mesmerized as you apply it just so. Like most housewives of 1965 you've collected those little white sample tubes as if gold. Placing them inside your dresser drawer on a clean embroidered handkerchief, sometimes handing me one for days of make - believe if I've been extra good and quiet when Penny's mama visits.

You are my very own Jackie Kennedy, and all I want to be is you.

I stare at the dress suspended from a black wire hangar upon the cheap paneled door. A thin, plastic covering straight from the cleaner's drapes over folds of blue fabric you carefully lift away.

The raising of its elegance above your frosted head, and away from your painted lips allows the silkiness to slide over your curves like a true magician.

Even I know that dress is meant to take the color of your eyes out into the world tonight, so everyone's head can turn at the beauty of you.

Two steps forward and you delicately lift the coveted bottle of Estee Lauder perfume from the nightstand where it lives, next to the faded photograph of your baby sister, frozen in time. It is your favorite, next to the perfume.

Each day I pass through your room to my own, I think maybe she is an angel guarding what is important to you.

Daddy braves the coldest winters every Christmas Eve after work, and before the stores close, just to buy it for you. It is his greatest joy to lavish upon you anything and everything you never thought you'd have.

He protects your fragile ways as if treasure while your children observe from all four corners of the house.

Reading, writing, listening to music, talking on the phone and cutting paper dolls out of Sears and Roebuck Catalogues, while the years pass.

Together yet separate.

Too young to understand what's missing, but old enough to hurt, we do not know we have already lost our voice to you.

Or how it will take a lifetime to find it.

You use it daily, that perfume. Managing to dole out sprays that somehow last throughout the year. But for special occasions, like this evening, you use a little extra and I try to stand closer in hopes that some may land on me.

I breathe you in. This smell that permeates my child's soul, binding me to every room you stand in.

Because nobody's mama smells better than mine.

I believe this is the way it could always be. Here with you in this space where everything looks and feels absolutely perfect.

Where growing up in the middle of an American Dream, nobody can see that a lipstick smile never quite reaches those broken parts we're always trying to fix.

Or, how I left that yellow twinkie packed inside my Brady Bunch lunchbox today, wanting to save it as proof of your love. Instead, I hungrily ate it as if filling a well meant to hold living water, with dirt.

Still, tonight I see you floating between soft candlelight on daddy's arm, harboring stories no one knows in the recesses of your heart.

Like everybody else.

And I twirl away in the locked secrets of your shadow, my Lady in Blue.