by Kelly Harms
I don’t chant very much. I used to chant at the end of class—I’ve got a nice enough voice, and the sutras are a beautiful aspect of the yogic tradition—but people always bitched about it on Yelp. They suggested I play Coldplay at the end of class instead. So I played Coldplay.
I wonder now if that was the right choice. I wonder if I should have kept chanting and kept selling Lynnsey’s handmade yoga shirts and never tried to promote my yoga studio online in the first place. I’d probably still be teaching classes of six people three times a day in that first stifling little studio and surviving on my credit cards. There was an integrity about it. But also a poverty.
Are those my only two choices? I wonder now. Playing to the masses or playing small?
I look at my mom. Her eyes are glossy and unfocused, like she’s not there. I wonder how much time she spends out here sitting lost in thoughts of him. It’s a worry. “Do you remember this one, Mom?” I ask. I breathe in and form the sound Ah and sing from below and into the note that begins the chant. Then I move through the Sanskrit syllables; my voice, which is breathy, not rich like my teacher’s, rests on the note until I reach the end. “Asatoma sadgamaya,” I sing, letting my voice play on each of the ahs of gamaya. Then I sing the syllables again, now climbing and falling along a little melody as I learned from Mom all those years ago. Then I finish, one more repetition of the Sanskrit, ending just one tone below the one I started on. “Asatoma sadgamaya.”
Mom smiles. “What a beautiful voice you have. All air. No earth.”
“I probably need to eat more eggplant,” I say, referring to the Ayurvedic tradition that would relate to a deficiency of earthiness. A lack of groundedness. I am thinking of how it felt to sink my feet into the gravel by the firepit, my hands into the soil near the parsnips, how rooted I feel to this piece of earth right now. “But I don’t feel a deficiency.”
“It wasn’t a criticism,” she says. “It isn’t all criticism, you know.”
“It’s mostly criticism,” I say, but gently.
“Lead us from the unreal to the real,” she says to me in response. That’s one translation of the syllables I sang a moment ago. I suspect her perception is the real and mine the unreal.
“And from death to immortality,” I finish, which is the end of the prayer that my chant began.
She leans her head on my shoulder, and I have to brace myself to keep from tipping over. I uncross my legs, bend at the knees, plant my feet on the ground, make a third leg of the stool with my back arm, and still have a hand free to rub my mother’s back. She’s critical, yes. But I love her. I didn’t realize how sad she still was. I think of how long I’ve privately grieved my dog. What, then, is the appropriate amount of time for Mom to grieve her son?
“When you’re here, in the Rockies, where we all spent so much time when you were kids, I miss him more,” she tells me. “That’s why I usually come to visit you instead.”
I frown. “I planned the wedding here so we could be closer to Andy,” I admit. “I didn’t think it would upset you. I’m sorry.”
“You know,” she says, ignoring my apology, “I was married here in the mountains, just like you would have been. And then your brother was born here, because I was a hippie and I thought it would be the best place to start his life.”
I nod. “And then you realized that Dad was a mistake, but before you resolved to leave him, you had an oops, and Dad didn’t want another child, and you had to move to Denver while you were pregnant and had a toddler, because that’s where the jobs were,” I complete.
She shakes her head. “That’s not exactly true. I’ve said it so many times it became our family history. But actually, it was my asatoma—my unreality, my delusion, or my falseness,” she translates, as well versed in Sanskrit as she is in anything else she takes an interest in. “The truth is, I knew Dad and I weren’t going to work out, and he knew it, too, long before you came along. But at the same time, I was the happiest I had ever been in my life. Being Andy’s mother changed me as a person. Every day he made me smile and gave me purpose and made sense of my life. Babies are hard, and your father didn’t help much, but Andy was an incredible little kid.”
I smile. This doesn’t surprise me. Andy wasn’t perfect, but he was the perfect older brother for me. He kept Mom from showing up at talent show nights in her ponchos and broomstick skirts and from packing a lunch with hard-boiled eggs that would smell up my locker for days. He is the one who took me by the hand the week before I started middle school and helped me figure out what to wear, how to find my tribe, how to let go of my stuffed-panda backpack and my bubblegum-pink hair bows without letting go of the things that really made me who I am. He took me along on his cross-country training runs and winked at my new friends in the hallway and made me feel like the coolest girl in the world when he would buy me a contraband Mountain Dew after school.
In fact, now that I think about it, I realize that Azalea, in time, will need an Andy of her own.
My mom goes on. “Motherhood made me so happy, in fact, that I decided to ask your father if we could have another baby before we went our separate ways. I knew I would be on my own, but I also knew I wanted another child, with all my heart. So we made you on purpose. It was your dad’s final kindness to me before we parted.”
My mouth falls open. “You’re kidding. I wasn’t an oops?”
“Not even a little bit.”
“Well, but Dad didn’t want me, though,” I say. This is a fact of life that I’ve come to live with in something like comfort, like the mole on my stomach that rubs against the waistband of only one pair of pants.
“Eh. I wanted you enough for two people,” Mom tells me. “But at the time, having a baby on your own on purpose was viewed as not just foolish but irresponsible. So I crafted a story that sounded more reasonable. And it became my story, in time.”
Andy’s words flash back to me. “Andy always said ‘reasonable’ was highly overrated.”
My mom looks toward the sky. “See, Andy? She listened to you, always you. Never me.”
“I listened to you. Sometimes to the detriment of my self-esteem,” I add with a gentle smile.
“But sometimes not,” my mom says unapologetically. That’s fine. I wasn’t angling for an apology. Besides, it’s true that in our little family unit, I preferred what my brother had to say most times. With him gone, I don’t always know how my mom and I are meant to fit together. That’s probably why we’ve spent so much time apart.
“In the end,” she says now, while I am listening, and listening carefully, “I told your brother the truth when he was in college. I told him our family was the way it was on purpose, and with no regrets. I told him my sat—my reality. And when we were camping, and his name came up, and I saw the look cross your face, the oh-no-she’s-going-to-cry-again look, I realized that somehow I’d never told you, even after all this time. I let you keep on thinking that Andy was somehow different from you, that your histories were different.”
Mom takes my hand. “Mia, the only difference between the two of you is that he was born in the clouds, and you were born on the ground, and he went back into the clouds, and you are still here with me.”
I look into her eyes and then touch my own face in surprise. It is as if the tears I feel in my eyes are running down her face, dripping off her chin.
Sometimes when I am alone, completely alone, and my phone is on silent, and the apartment is dark, I pretend I live in a world where Andy and Mike are still here. I pretend Mike is in bed by my legs with his chin up on my knees, and Andy calls me on the phone to talk about some nice guy he just met or a jerk he has to deal with at the office. I like to imagine that these two souls know each other now, in the next world, that they look after each other and sometimes they gossip about me.
“I’ve always felt . . . ,” I say to her, wondering why I didn’t say it sooner and then knowing that until now, I’ve never had to. “I felt that when Andy died, something about our relatio
nship died too. He was the one who made sense of us all together.”
She nods. “That’s true. But even now, he can still help us figure it out.” She sits up straight and takes me by the hand that was until now resting on her back, and she presses it to her heart. “What would he say to us if he were here right now?”
I know the answer to that without even a moment’s consideration, as if he were standing before me holding up cue cards and stamping his feet. “He would say, Mia, it’s reasonable to go back home and shrug off all the bad stuff and get back to work, just like you’ve always done. It’s reasonable to ignore the cute chicken guy and his awkward daughter and your sometimes slightly annoying mom and go back to life as it was. But if that’s not what you want to do . . .” My voice trails off, my throat tight with emotion.
“Reasonable is overrated,” finishes my mother.
“Yes,” I say, my voice wobbly.
Mom wraps me up in one of her twenty-second hugs. “You know by now how lucky you are that you didn’t get married to Tucker,” she tells me when she finally lets go.
I nod. I do know.
“No matter what you told everyone—and in your case it really is everyone—about your plans and your happiness and what you thought you wanted, your sat, your reality, was always there. Sitting in the corner. Being real. Waiting.”
I think of Tucker’s stupid but correct text message. As annoying as it was, it came just in the nick of time. I tried not to think about how he was wrong for me, just as I tried to distract myself from my grief over Mike, just as I pushed down all the heartbreak when we lost Andy. But those things all caught up with me. “It’s better,” I realize aloud, “if you just run at the truth full speed.”
The truth, the sorrow, the grief, the joy.
My mom smiles and brushes a tear from my cheek. “Smarter than your mother after just a little while offline,” she says. “Think of what you’ll know when you’re sixty-five.”
I consider the last couple of weeks. I arrived here with a plan, a big plan, that would shape every moment of my future. I told everyone who would listen, which was a lot of people. When it fell through, I faked it, and when I couldn’t fake it anymore, I did a disappearing act. But while I have been disappeared, I’ve found something in myself I didn’t know I had.
And while that has been absolutely wonderful, I can’t just stay in hiding for the rest of my life.
Or rather, I can, but where will that leave me?
PART II
MIA CULPAS
PAIGE
Gorgeous morning in the Rockies and I’m feeling high! Not that kind of high, LOL! (the munchies sound like my worst nightmare, amirite?) But #lifeisgood anyway—we’re going to get out today and have adventures TBD, check out a few more #summercocktails, and definitely catch an act at the @DillonAmphitheater, and of course, I can’t forget to talk to you guys, who make it all worthwhile. Let me know what you’re looking forward to today, and if you need a boost keep coming back to the feed, because we’ll be posting all the good stuff as it happens . . . xo Mia
In the end, Jessica and I achieve ninety-six posts in the next four days. We post the clothes, the shopping, the meals, the drinks, the parks, the music, and our room at the inn, which has been made up beautifully, outfitted with an extra robe and towels for my sister, and filled with garden cuttings while we were gone. When we are not posting, we are pushing the little heart button on comments, trying to respond to as many as humanly possible, and desperately losing control of the constant flood of DMs.
On Saturday, Jessica sleeps until the last call for breakfast. I get up at five a.m. to start dealing with the feed again and work on it nonstop until we go down to the dining room together. Though I am loath to give too much credit to Mia, being her is starting to feel, I have to admit, like a bit of a chore.
After I have my utterly delicious eggs with smoked trout and chives, Jessica instructs me to go upstairs and change into my “workout clothes” so she can continue eating an amount of bacon that may in fact count as a self-harming behavior. I decide not to mention it, focusing instead on the term workout clothes.
“All my clothes are designed for activity,” I tell her. “I buy very stretchy pants.”
“Yeah, I’ve seen ’em,” says Jessica, not sounding pleased about it. “I guess what you need for today is something you can bike in that will not be too hot that you look kind of cute in.”
“We are going to cycle? In the Rocky Mountains? I don’t think that level of exertion is in order for either of us.”
“It’s a flat trail.”
I look pointedly at the mountains rising up above the town outside the windows of the dining room. “How can that be?” I ask.
Jessica shrugs. “Railroad something something? Anyway, we’ll take it easy. We’ll have to stop constantly for photos anyway.”
“Do you have a bike?” I ask her. “I do not have a bike.”
“Nah, it got stolen at school.”
I raise one eyebrow.
“Oh, stop it. Bikes get stolen at Berkeley too. And Harvard or Oxford or wherever you went to undergrad.”
“That was also Berkeley,” I say. “I don’t know about bikes there. I never had one. I haven’t ridden a bike since I was a kid.”
“So never, then,” she says.
“No,” I say. “I had a childhood. Really! I had a vivid childhood and a challenging adolescence.” I say no more. “I will bicycle with you, but in normal clothes. If I notice you looking fatigued, I will request that we break or even stop.”
“Understood,” says Jessica. “Anyway, it’s good for me to exercise. It’s on my resilience checklist in two places.”
“What exactly is that?” I ask. “Your resilience checklist?”
“The things I am going to do to get undepressed,” she tells me. “The psychiatrist at the hospital said it’s my summer job.”
I frown. It occurs to me that I was imagining that helping impersonate Mia Bell was her summer job.
“Very well,” I say. “What are the other items on your checklist?”
She whips out her phone and opens something. “One: connection with others. That’s this,” she says, pointing back and forth between her and me. “Two: daily activity. Biking in this case.”
“Ok,” I say, seeing that her two summer jobs are not incompatible. “What else?”
“Three: time spent in nature.”
I nod. “Cortisol levels. I read that study.”
She shrugs. “Also nature is nice,” she adds.
I shrug, having not noticed that to be true.
“Four,” she continues. “Meditation or mindfulness practice.”
“Oh boy,” I say.
“The doctor says it works!” she tells me.
“I’ve seen the science. I just don’t care to sit around breathing all the time,” I tell her.
“Yoga counts.”
I say nothing.
“Mia likes yoga,” she goes on.
“Move along,” I say.
“Number five: sleep. I figure I’ll get plenty of that once they have a bed for me at the loony bin.”
I clear my throat.
“What?” she asks.
“Well, since you asked, those things are all very time and effort consuming. Exercise is tiring; sleep isn’t always up to you; nature is cold and wet and has bugs. Connection takes work and leaves you open to all kinds of hurts. And meditation is . . . well . . . dull.”
She looks at me with surprise and concern. “But . . . what’s the alternative? Misery and disconnection and abject failure?”
I blanch. “Of course not. After you’re discharged from the center, you’ll just finish your course requirements as quickly as possible at a local college and get a job promptly. Then you’ll have plenty to fill your time, and money and health insurance besides.”
Jessica makes a face. “But I need to learn resilience,” she says. “My coursework and career come second to my mental health.”<
br />
“Well, I suppose so, yes. But you needn’t worry. By that time your medications will be working, and you’ll feel perfectly fine,” I say to her. “You won’t need to be resilient anymore.”
Jessica looks down. “I’m not sure that’s the case for everyone,” she says.
“It will be for you,” I say. “The meds take tweaking, but they’ll do all the work. No need for all the other stuff.” After all, look at me. Right?
“What’s wrong with doing both?” she asks. “The meds and the meditation?”
“It’s not expedient,” I say with finality. This conversation has made me feel irrationally defensive. Like my methods of coping are somehow being cast into doubt. “I’m going to go change now. Into my ‘workout’ clothes. Did you get some pictures of breakfast?” I ask her.
“Plenty,” she calls back. “They’re in your shared folder.”
“Thank you,” I say. “I’ll be back down after I change and post.”
As I walk upstairs, I mutter to myself. “Probably all pictures of bacon,” I grumble. “Resilience checklists,” I add. “Meditation! Why does it always have to be meditation?” It sounds like Karrin was her doctor.
Back in the room, I sit on the bed. I scroll quickly through the miles of comments for Mia. Many are nice, some are neutral, but some are complaining that it’s ten a.m. mountain time and she hasn’t posted in an hour. Some are trolls telling her to “get dead.” Some are people saying how they wish they could afford such a nice trip or that they feel depressed about how much “Mia” can eat each day without gaining weight or that it must be nice to have stores and restaurants giving you free things all day. People! Get over yourselves!
I know the real Mia would let all these things stand, but I want to shout at them, Stop all your whining and complaining! I paid for all those things! With money I’ve saved from never having an actual life! In my mind I indulge the inner scream even further: And I’m not even Mia, you dolts! I’m a complete stranger with a big butt, and I bulk buy underpants, and you can’t tell the difference.