In Parts

When I first saw the Pierces live I didn't immediately associate them with my mother and I, but now it seems impossible I hadn't seen it before.

People say I look just like my mother, and I do in parts. Our eyes, cheekbones, silhouettes, the angle of our collar bones, the ring of our laughter. In parts, but not the whole.

My mother had this arresting beauty and edge when she was young. They say there wasn't a man who met her not in love, every woman left jealous in her wake, not any person left anything but mystified by her. She is this mythical creature; my blond, blue-eyed, singing, dancing, arguing, teasing, laughing,crying, screaming running lunging fighting mother who made every patch of light her home. She was unforgettable -- a blaze cracking and spitting out, drawing in, burning searing, and warming those around her with no domain and yet was limited, still.

My mother in 2012

Men and women alike claimed she seemed more intelligent, clever, funny, loving, and creative merely by the way her eyes danced with sparkling fury while she performed. They never did claim to see devotion. My mother was, and still is, a being of movement- her feet never really do grip the Earth like the rest of ours do.

There are no pictures, only old video footage from 1992 taken in what seems to be a place obliterated the moment I try and find it. As if my touch is condemned in claiming some sort of heritage in this romanticized collection of the patron saints sinned before her -- on their knees under the weight of her stunning beauty. The Fall of Man which pulled her in to domestic purgatory -- which chained her in diamond rings and cribs, mortgages and minivans, which so threatened her spirit which only dances in legend before my eyes.

Me in 1994

She is no more real to me in this context than Madonna, Princess Dianna, and Marilyn Monroe. Sometimes it seems a horrible injustice to have never met her before I grew like a parasite in her -- sharing parts of her, but a thief of the whole not only wilted in age, but stolen.

If only I could find that fire in me; if only I could be half as empowered by her canvassed image than my own. I did not just steal her spirit, essence, and beauty -- I consumed it. When I see The Pierces now, I am the background guitarist; forgettable except for her relation to the mystifying singer on stage.