To Mary Lizzo, the Original

I was an ugly little girl. My father tells me this isn’t true, and only recently had you started agreeing with him. But a father’s eyes are biased. I knew what I was, and everyone who saw me then knew, too. I knew because I didn’t understand. I knew because I had a yearning, a never ending hunger in me, growing as I did; wanting so much to be a part of something, and knowing that beauty was the only way out.
I do remember sitting in front of the mirror, even then, staring into my face, assessing what I liked and didn’t. My face is yours. We look the same, we speak in the same booming tones, we hide the same mysteries, the same worries, the same shattered hopes, glass under the carpet. Ever since I was born its been this way. So remarkable are our similarities that I find my thoughts are often yours. I can see yours, even though I’m sure you think I don’t. You were the one who gave me this, the ability to see what is lying underneath the carpet, this sense.
But there are things I have and you envied. My hair is thick and full, and if I leave it alone, as you say, it curls. I don’t like my curls, the hair nature gave me; I love it soft, long, curved at the bottom and blown sleek. It’s always been fairer than yours, I didn’t inherit the dark hair of either of my parents. My eyes are my own. Green, unlike anyone else in our family. Dark and deep, filled with emotion and imagination. I used to tell people that they were an incomplete dominance between your brown and Dad’s blue. I was right, but only loosely. My eyes are my essence; two nature fighting in me, two people to live within one body.
I am told we look like someone who died. Someone who no one mentioned until I was older, until I asked who she was, having heard her name loosely thrown around in conversation. I often think about her, this woman. Dead at twenty one, heart problems, the kind you say we don’t have in our family. I want to see her photo, I want to put it up on my mirror along with my endless other pictures; England and Prince Harry, an “M” from high school, my cousin and I in London. I want to put her face next to mine. I want to see where I come from.
I want to know her, talk to her. Was she like me? Did she have dreams and aspirations, things she wanted to do but perhaps coudln;t because she was ill? One of your aunts, I can never remember, they remember her. Coming from the subway from work (did she work?) and running into her arms. Who was this woman, what purpose did she serve to those around her? Was she the type of woman who’d you’d run into? This girl who died when she was the age I am now. This girl who wore our face before either of us existed, before anyone knew our names, understood our prescence. I believe she was small because you are, I believe she had our hips, I perceive her wearing my hair, thick and full, even though I know this is a trait from my Irish side and none of your own. I want to think she was happy, but I know this isn’t true. I feel her. I feel her here now more than anyone then could feel her, even that aunt who ran into her arms from the subway. She was strong, like I am, she understood unhappiness. She was sad. She felt alone, she knew she was going to die and was afraid most of not death but of not living. Of no longer being able to breathe. That last breath she took, she felt it. But when she lived, she was strong. She could bear all of her pain and everyone else’s too. She bore the pain of poverty, of immigration, of children too small to know she was ill. She had room to love everyone so much that she left herself behind, cursed with the fate of never seeing full adulthood. I think she wanted children. I think she wanted love. I think she knew it was something too much, something she could not have.
It wasn’t until I was odler did people stop calling me ugly. It wasn’t until I was older I learned about this woman. It wasn’t until then I knew that I was beautiful just like she was. She was so beautiful that the world didn’t keep her. I bet she turned men’s heads as she walked down the street, but more women’s, as women do turn at jealousy, a poison we all love to drink. Beauty is an illusion, I’ve always said, bewildered by the different lives I’ve lived. When I knew I was beautiful, the world around me did, too. I’m not sure if she cried when she knew her life would end, but I know she cried and often. With beauty comes pain, you told me as you burned my hair with the iron as a child. This woman had pain. This woman bore pain for everyone else, and in the end, cried only for herself. She wanted to belong to someone, to something. She came into this world beautiful and alone and left it just the same.
I want to think they cried at her funeral. There is a sick sweet meaning in it, to see the distraught faces of her mother and father, but mostly her mother. Did that aunt cry the loudest? Did they beat the coffin as it went in? Did the community send money and flowers? How come we’ve left her to buried, why does no one remember her funeral? Why does no one think of her on the holidays, no one call out her name at Mass in prayer? Why have we let her go?
I want to yell out everytime I get your answer to these questions in me, that no one remembers, it was so long ago. No one cares to remember a woman dead longer than she lived. No one cares to remember her, this woman people took for granted, pain they put in her to carry, so much it killed her. I want to yell out, I want to kick, I want to scream and badger you like a child until you tell me. Until the secrets are unveiled, until she is real again.
(I know you keep them, I know they are in you.)
But I believe she is happy now. And I believe she watches over us, you and me, characterizations of beauty in all its forms, tradgedy and excellence, talent and greed, kindness and severity. She gave her face to you and you gave it to me. Our lives are touched by this woman who never really left the world at twenty one. I have her thoughts and her face, and I like to think her eyes were green. And for her and for me, who lived with a fear of being forgotten for so long, I will mention her here. I will scream out her name in the streets, I will ride the subway and fall into her arms. I will cry her tears over this keyboard, I will long for the wedding she never had. I will cry for her, this woman we never knew and yet know so well, I will set her pain free, making it real. I want everyone to know her. I want to bring myself closer. I want to hold her hand and talk to her like I would with any other girl my age. I want to be her friend.
I want to carry her pain.
We make her memory real everyday, I think that was where we are damned. Looking like this woman, serving as an angry reminder to those people who buried her name along with her body, made her a hushed topic among dinner. Her pain, her unhappiness is reflected in every one of our frowns, her happiness in our smiles. Our laughter must sound likes hers, our hips sway likes hers. Our small hands and feet, our tiny nails, our long necks, our perfect ears, all her own. Our pain is nothing new, she gave us this too. Our tears taste as hers did. Our skin, soft and pale, yours still unwrinkled, I know why. It isn’t ours at all. We will never get old, she never did. We will forever be young, we will forever be this way, beautiful and tradgic. We will forever see more than is immediate to the eye, more than anyone else can see. Because we’ve seen it before, we know it and understand it and have contemplated it before.
We are her.
And together, maybe, the three of us, we aren’t alone.