The Girl with the Tattoos: Reposted to groups

I wrote this for Francesca when she was nineteen, never dreaming that, one day, I'd be using it to pay tribute at her funeral.

--Beryl Singleton Bissell

This evening, I watch you force the zipper on your roller-blade outfit, pressing the soft curves of your new womanliness into the tight black elastic you wear. You drop onto the front steps and lace your skates. You are nineteen and your raven hair a cascading waterfall that hides your face. The skates only partially obscure the rose you've had tattooed on your left calf. It looks like a dragon, tendrils and vines snaking themselves in pale greens and blues toward your knee. A butterfly spreads its wings in thin black lines across your right forearm.

As I stand here with you, I find myself wondering what you will do with those tattoos when you are older. I try to picture you as a fifty-year old with tattoos but my mind cannot travel that far. Instead I try to memorize the way you look at this moment, vibrant, healthy, and filled with fun. I know that tomorrow might be different and today a too brief interlude between the tormented zones you travel in. You snap the plastic fasteners on your skates and spring back into a standing position, turning to grin at me as you push off.

 "Bye Mom," you say, blowing me a kiss. Then you weave your way up the street, looking like an ordinary teen instead of the wayfarer you've become.

I've been collecting images Francesca from the time you were a newborn, miniatures in which to shelter my memories. I started early because your Daddy was dying when you were born. In a photo, taken the Christmas he died, he holds you proudly—you in red velvet with a bow somehow attached to your fuzzy head; his gauntness a sharp contrast to your rosiness. I remember the following Christmas when you leaped and pirouetted with your little brother, two toddlers mimicking the dancers you watched on TV, sugar plum fairies and nutcrackers, toy soldiers.  I smile while remembering how you loved to help me cook, you wearing an apron so large it gobbled you up, your three-year old face wide with laughter as you waved a rosary above a bowl of gingerbread cookie dough.

It is here that I begin to edit these memories for I didn't know when I remarried that, like a flower picked too early, your buoyant spirit would fade under its influence. As I pause over these images I try to catch your laughter, which seems to dissolve even as I listen, to memorize your smile before it trembles and becomes more tentative. I see you sitting on the floor in your room drawing a heart -- your tears have splashed the color and it bleeds across the page. My walls are filled with your paper cutouts -- butterflies and hearts and snowflakes -- each one telling me how you love me. I hold you as you ask why Daddy Ray doesn't love you when you've "tried so hard to make him happy." I know, because he's told me, that you'll only be loved when he finds you loveable.

I try to erase these images and to focus instead on the times we were safe and happy together. The incline at Bunker Hills where we'd escape to slide, snow spraying our faces, screaming with laughter so free that it ricochets off the bright winter air. Trips to the lake to picnic and swim, where you leaped and chattered. Ballet classes where I watched with aching gratitude as your face relaxed and your arms reached for the beauty you seemed to see so clearly there.

I had hoped, Francesca, that by leaving that destructive marriage I could save you, but discovered that I'd waited too long. Wounds that refused to heal became your heritage. While I grew stronger and wiser you retreated into a world where I couldn't follow. So now I must focus on good images to keep intact the child/woman I love who hides under so many faces. I believe that the resilient spirit you are will one day burst from the pod into which it's retreated. When that day comes, the images I've so carefully gathered will float away. You will have transformed them into a woman far more beautiful. You'll move down the road and you won't be leaving. You'll be on your way.