Mira's Journal

She's gone.

She held on just long enough to see me and now she's gone.

She passed at home.  She held me as tight as her poor, weak arms could.  She cradled me like she used to when we were kids.  My brother and my sister and my father all gathered close, close, and we were a family and my wings never came out once.

But then she told them--my family and the nurses and everyone--that she wanted to be alone with me.

"Miriam.  My sweet Miriam.  You need to know.  You weren't mine.  I love you like you were mine, but you're not."

And she told me everything.  I recorded it on my phone.  I never want to forget her voice.

---

We were young, your father and I.  We wanted a child.  We tried so hard, Miriam.  We tried everything.  Even in-vitro fertilization didn't take.  I lost all hope.  It ate me up inside.  It ate your father up inside too.  We took refuge in our faith.

That little fountain out back, behind the synagogue?  The one you always loved?  I sat there one Saturday morning after services and cried until there was nothing left to cry out anymore.  And then I heard something.  Like laughter.  A baby's laughter.

And there you were, Miriam!  Laying beside the fountain, a tiny infant thing.  Naked and pink and sweet, without a fear or a care in the world.  It was cold, it was October, and you didn't care.  I picked you up and brought you inside, but nobody had ever seen you before.  I called the police, and they tried to find somebody who had lost a child, but there were no reports.  We adopted you formally.

I named you after the water I found you beside.  Water that rebels.  And you rebelled so much, all your life.  I felt like I was committing a crime against nature sometimes, like I was keeping a butterfly trapped in a jar.  You wanted so badly to be free, so I let you be free in the circus.  I never should have asked you to leave, Miriam.  You thrived there.

I love you.  I love you so much, sweetheart.  I didn't give birth to you, no.  But you'll always be my little girl.  My little butterfly.  You're not in the jar anymore.

---

She stopped talking, after that.  I cried and cried and cried until I was empty, and she cried, and everyone else came back in and we all cried, and somewhere in the crying she was gone.

I wasn't hers.  I was hers but I wasn't.  My father, my siblings, not mine.

They call me Miriam Roth.  I wonder who I actually am.

I can't stay for the funeral.  I have to go back to London.  I wear a torn black ribbon pinned to my dress and I sit here in the living room of my childhood home and my mother is gone and she wasn't my mother.

You sit shiva for seven days.  I can only stay for two.

The house is eerie and silent.  Everyone's sleeping.  The sun is up.  It's a new day.  It's my first day without a mother.  Except it isn't.  But it's my first day without the woman who raised me and loved me and told me I was a little shining star meant to glitter on the stage.

What am I?

Mom, I wish you could still give me answers.

Faery.

Bullshit.

Fuck all that.  I've got a booty call tomorrow night.  Break furniture, he says?  Good.  I like to hurt.

Tonight has been...where do I start?  Where do I end?

I start with Alice and the mad tea party and I end in the arms of somebody I never thought I'd see again.

Alice Clare Donovan.  My relationship with her is beyond strange.  The first woman I ever kissed, the first woman I ever fucked.  It's like I only ever see her wrapped around Don or naked in my sheets.  Except tonight.  She threw a little tea party for herself and this strange dead man named Francis.  We fed him squirrel eyes.  I think my old self might have been horrified by it.  I got a laugh out of popping them in his mouth and making zooming airplane noises like I was feeding a toddler.

The tea was raspberry and sweet and wonderful.  Probably a little drugged, too, I know how she and Don operate.  Not enough to make me trip balls, but enough to leave me more giddy than I should have been.  Or maybe that was the text.

The last time I saw Gabriel Martinez, we were in the circus together.  He was grace.  He was wild beauty.  He wanted to taste my blood.  I let him because I couldn't not let him.  I lost him when I left, because I had to go, for my mother.  I should have told him I was desperately in love with him and I should have told him that I would try to see him as soon as I could, but nobody loves a broken thing with jagged edges.  So I just walked away and went back to Manhattan and told myself I'd forget.  I told Alice he was just some weird guy with a freaky blood fetish.

He texted me this evening.  I'm in London, he says.  I want to see you, he says.  Alone, he says.  I told him to meet me in the woods, not far from the grove where I danced naked on Mabon and learned what I am.

But first, tea.  Tea with Alice.  Tea with Alice needed a Mad Hatter and I was lucky enough to be wearing that big black thing, the one that Will wants to cover in tin foil and LED lights and call it a spaceship.  I did what a good Mad Hatter would do. I sat and had tea.  And things were going so well, too.  The drugs dulled my nerves about seeing Gabriel again.  The petit fours were beyond precious.  My cup had the word DANGER on it.  We spoke and I spilled my guts to her about feeling insignificant and small in the face of whatever dark, overwhelming love she and Don share.  It was good to get it off my chest.  She told me never to feel envy again.  Envy, she says, makes us weak.  Are you weak, Mira? she asked.

When I asked about Francis, she flew into a rage.  Not at me, at least.  At him.  He's done horrid things, but I don't know what they are.  I do know that Miss Donovan has ruined my second blouse in two days.  I think the first is still in Xavier's motel room, torn.  This one's drenched in tea and I don't think I can ever get it out.  Maybe I can try to make it a fashion statement.  Tea-dyed clothes.  All the rage for fall, you know.

I had outstayed my welcome.  I went back to my dorm and changed, and then I went to see Gabriel.

I think I understand it now, what Alice says about herself and Don and what they share.  She simply said it all wrong.  She said it like the sheer depths of it are inaccessible to us mere mortals, but that's not the case.  The depravity of it...that probably is.  But the depths?  Gabriel knows me better than I know me, even after some six months apart.  He knew what I needed to feel, what I've been looking for from everyone else in this godforsaken rain bucket of a city.  

Alright, that's not fair to say.  The women were pretty good at providing it.  Freya, and miss Alice herself.  That's an apples to oranges comparison.  But Gabriel is the only man I've known who can make pain feel like bliss.

I couldn't fill up the hole in my heart because the only thing that could fix it was on the other side of the Atlantic.  But he's here now, he's here and I think he loves me and we don't dare say it.

Oh, it's not like that.  Monogamy?  Bullshit.  Not with what we both are.  We're both beings meant to lure and seduce.  But maybe, just maybe, I've found what I've been looking for.

I need to google how to hide big, bloody bites in my flesh.  I can't pancake on makeup or wear elaborate ruffs around my neck like I did in the circus.  Or maybe I can.  All the rage for fall, you know.  With tea-dyed clothes.

Oh, Mom.  You would have hated what I've become.  I'm sorry.  But you took an Unseelie faerie into your home and called her yours, and I can't help that.

Boys don't stay. Gabriel didn't stay.