November 13, 2005

The unveiling was really amazing.

This whole thing has been..I don't know what to call it a reckoning or a resolution or a return and words have failed me and they're going to fail me again now.

I am listening to the Joshua Tree and feeling the entire book of my life fluttering through the valves of my heart.

I would put the letter I read to my mother here but my father quite wisely said; "what you just said was very beautiful - don't blog it okay."

When I was 16 years old I used to sit in my bedroom listening to this album and draw pictures and write poems and think about all the things I would do when I was a grown up. which would be now I guess although I don't really believe that.

I can't believe it's finally coming to a close. I can't believe I stood there over my own mothers grave and talked to the women who gave birth to me and doesn't exist anymore. I am going to put one sentence from my letter in because i think it's the only thing I have managed to get right.

"I miss you. I miss everything I lost last year. I miss being a child and I miss certainty. I miss being your daughter."

There was a lot of crying - but it wasn't sad it was amazing. People are amazing. Not because of their strength but because of their fragility and their courage. I am so thankful for the people who came and stood with my brother and I and shared that moment with us.

Families are strange and funny and moving and irritating and constantly shifting organisms. I think that for me at least the rules of membership are not defined by blood or by nomenclature. Maybe only our histories need to pull us together and apart and then together again.