the dancing mirror

as you all know the story leading up to my mother hating music is a sad one, one she doesn't tell .... Ever. but if you know the story you might know why she doesn't tell it. But you don't know the story, only three people really know the whole story one of whom is dead, one is my mother and last of all is me. she did tell me, once. only once and i was seven. the night it slipped out of her mouth was the night he died and I was "the only person she had left in the world". so there we sat in the middle of the kitchen floor a large tub of double mint chocolate ice cream between us. and it all slipped out between bites of minty goodness and moments of teary sobs she told me everything. it was a lot to be understood at my age. an age where you want everything to be right in the world, your too young to understand that bad things and sometimes even Really Really bad things happen to everybody. but i understood it. perhaps i didn't but i remembered it until i was old enough to understand it. i remember that next day we didn't go to church, we always went to church. So while i wasn't at church for the first time and my mother was in bed with a splintering headache i went and saw the shadow. I walked two blocks and the door wasn't locked and I found the place where tha paint wasn't faded, where the giant mirror had hung for years. it didn't hang there my whole life. but the paint was brighter there and i saw the holes where the beam had been screwed to the wall. and i understood the hardwood floors for the first time. maybe that is when i decided. i don't actually remember if it was that moment or the moment when i was sitting with my long legged grace full mother eating ice cream or if later on it just sorta binged into my brain but it was planted, a seed of idea, a seed of passion for something i knew little about. and from then one whenever i saw a point shoe, or a large mirror or ate double mint ice cream that thought that idea shot up like bamboo until i couldn't contain it. so i decided to do what my mother couldn't even talk about anymore, because her lose was far too great. i didn't blamed her or judge her. i knew her reasons made sense. i also knew what I was going to do might hurt her grately but i knew, little me at the age of almost nine that if this worked it would be the only thing to truly ever heal her. so i would do it, for me, and perhaps even for her. i was going to dance.