Sarah Harley
I want to buy my mother a present. I know she’s gone, but the wanting persists—a thought I can’t resolve. It catches in my chest like a knot, or a pinched nerve behind my ribcage.
I still imagine what I could give her: white freesias from the market, a silver bracelet, a bottle of her French perfume—Anaïs Anaïs. She used to dab it on her wrists with her fingertips, the scent mysterious and melancholic.
Perhaps a silk headscarf would be best.
She kept her headscarves folded in the drawer of the dressing table in her bedroom. Toward the end of her life, she stopped wearing them because she didn’t dress up anymore or even leave the house. She wore the same mouse-brown sweater and brown corduroys.
My mother died from breast cancer at forty-eight. I was thirteen.
It was June, our house filled with silence and hushing. I remember a blue blanket, soft and threadbare. A dark room. My father shook the blanket into the air; I watched as dust motes drifted through the faint light.
From that day forward, I am always counting—days, months, years of absence. I count the half-lives too—the years without her outweighing the ones with her.
I try to count the number of presents I never gave her—one for every Christmas, all her birthdays in May that passed without any celebration. One for each time I was too small to give her something. The numbers blur.
I always fall short.
I always feel guilty—even though I was just a kid.
***
I imagine scarves my mother would love—swallows and dragonflies fluttering across silk; nightingales and moths, their wings forming mirrored patterns. Moths are messengers from the spirit world, able to cross thresholds between the living and the dead.
I picture stars and galaxies, tiny moons in orbit. Gold and silver flickering across midnight blue, fading into black. Vast negative spaces.
Lighthouses and sailboats, waves on a turbulent sea, glimmers of light inside an undertow.
I think about all the things that represent my mother. I add some that feel like me: fir trees, fields of wildflowers, mist in the mountains, my tent pitched in a clearing in the woods.
I tie the corners of the scarves together to create a makeshift counterpane—an eiderdown, wide enough to cover land and sea. In my mind, my mother holds two corners as I grasp the other side.
I remember how we folded the threadbare bedsheets at home. When it was about to rain, we ran outside to unpeg them from the washing line, bare feet pressing into cold stone, the wind tugging at the sheets.
As we hold the corners of the imaginary eiderdown, it billows, drawing around us and softening all sound. The world hushes. Our arms grow tired from holding it, so we pin the corners up against the sky.
Then it’s in place: a soft canopy above my mother and me. Filtered light dances through the material. Our private sky beneath the real one.
I also make dresses from the headscarves, with flared skirts and flowing silhouettes. I pin them carefully to tissue-paper patterns, then stitch pieces together. My mother and I twirl across a wooden floor to an old song, the kind she might have played on a crackling record player when she was young. I want to play dress-up with my mother.
***
There’s a wardrobe in a forest house, beyond time, in a high-ceilinged room. The wood creaks when you open the door, and the air smells like cedar and sandalwood—similar to my mother’s perfume. The dresses hang untouched, as if waiting for her return.
Just beyond the seam where the world ends, where mist rises and the air stills—that’s where I find her again. I carry a present wrapped in soft paper.
She smiles as she unwraps it. It’s a silver locket, with a tiny key tucked inside.
I wear one just like it.
Grief is the key only I can see. It glints in the dark. I try every door, but the rooms stay empty.
I grow older than she ever was. Still, I buy gifts I never give.
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Sarah Harley is originally from the UK. She works at Milwaukee High School of the Arts where she helps refugee students to tell their own stories. Sarah holds a BA in Comparative Literature and French, as well as an MA in Foreign Language and Literature. Her work is deeply informed by her lived experience navigating childhood trauma and PTSD. Her essays have appeared in West Trade Review, Glassworks Magazine, Mud Season Review, and elsewhere. You can read more of her work here: sarahharley888.com.