Before the Readathon
Time moves in mysterious ways. Just when I think I won’t cry today, I catch a glimpse of my mother’s roses as they lounge in the backyard with a certain peace that is enviable.
When my mother got her port put in, I brainstormed plans for how we were going to celebrate when she got it out. She had a plan of going to Barnes and Noble and going out for Mexican food. And when she had her surgery, we were going to celebrate, relax, with a readathon.
I don’t know if everyone my age continuously feels like they are learning something big, something that they should have known by now. Grief is the biggest something possible. Years ago I had a dream that a Brobdingnagian tsunami swept across the world, smothering all in murky water. Throughout the dream I was alone, searching for a loved one, when I saw my mother standing near a cave (it was a strange dream). A certain relief filled me from head to toe. But my mother said, “I didn’t make it. I am here to say goodbye. I have to leave soon.”
This will never not feel unfair.
That gets us to this readathon, the most special one that I have ever done. For one, I am spreading it out over three days instead of two. Anything smaller would not match my sorrows.
I have decided to take a leap into the more talked about books on Booktube and Bookstagram with Leigh Bardugo’s Ninth House, which I know nothing about. Following this, I am tackling Shakespeare’s Othello, which was my mother’s second favorite Shakespeare. Rounding this out for today, I am going to be finishing Rumi’s beloved Masnavi, one of my favorite books. Tomorrow, I am aiming for Durga Chew-Bose’s Too Much and Not the Mood.
I went to the library with my aunt and cousin a few days ago. I perused the shelves, ultimately coming back with Ninth House and Catherine Lacey’s Pew, which I have checked out before but never sat down and read. For my last readathon, I was hungry for “sophisticated” books, not really knowing what that even meant. This go-around, I am simply soaking up words like a parched mouth finding an oasis at her feet.
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Tonight, I am reading my thesis for my peers at The Johns Hopkins University. I will be reading from chapter one of Canis Major.
There is a certain gloom over me. I want my mother to see me publish it one day. My mother and grandmother worked hard for their dream, which was to have a legacy. My grandmother wrote poetry; my mother wrote plays and television scripts. I do intend to find a literary agent for my mom’s work. She was too talented for her words to not be heard. And it was also my mother’s dream that I become a writer. In fact, after my father proposed the name Savannah Tate to her shortly before I was born, Mom agreed to it because she thought it sounded like a great penname.
Canis Major’s first chapter charts the relationship between two brothers, Lysander and Remy. I won’t go into too much detail, but I do have a few lines that have never felt more real to me than this past week. I don’t understand how it has been a week — I see something in the news, and my first instinct is to text her.
This is only the first step toward feeling like she is in my heart, not sitting beside me at a coffee shop with her dissertation opened and a fountain pen poised over her notebook. I will miss her forever. I will paw over each word of these books with the hope that some story will prick my finger and I will feel the blood in my veins that means life.
Happy reading.
