If I Could Relive a Day of My Life

I don't have a lot of memories of my mother because we were apart.  I remember visits to Terminal Island or Pleasanton.  Cold visits in cordoned areas to mingle with inmates were not memorable even when the inmate was your mother.  There was a time when i was 18 however.  She had been out of prison and trying to get her life together with a man 30 years her senior.  She was supposedly clean but her relationship with heroin and methadone was a palette of smeared colors and images, overlapping and smudging one another into a mural of indistinct confusion.  

My Aunt and Uncle told me my mom was coming to take my brother and I to Knott's Berry Farm.  It was an amusement park.  We rode the rides and she waited.  I did not know how to act.  She was my mom and I longed for her but I did not know how to be close to her.  I went through the motions.  I laughed and smiled and enjoyed the trappings of the park.  I didn't know what to say.  At the end of the night we stopped at Coco's back in town before being dropped off at our home with our Aunt and Uncle.  My mom disappeared to the restroom for a long time.  When she finally returned my brother and i had mostly finished our meals.  She apologized and sat down to her salad.  A moment later her head dropped towards the table and her face fell into the salad.  I was 18.  My mom gathered herself and woke up...some.  She drove us home.  I didn't know.  Maybe I should have but I did not.  I always believed every word she said to me.  When she said she was not on heroin I knew it was true.  Only later when my Aunt and Uncle commented did it occur to me she may have lied, even to me.  

If I could relive that day I would tell her I loved her so much she would not need heroin.  I just know she was looking for love in that drug.  I know she was looking for my love in that heroin.  I know the years and years apart had taken a toll on her.  I know she sought love in all kinds of ways.  I needed her love too.  We were both emptier from not having one another.  It was commensurate.  If I could relive that day I would tell her I love her on the ride to the park, at the log ride, in the old west section of the park, at the games and the roller coasters.  I would tell her on the ride home, too, and at Coco's, and she would feel the warmth and that thing from inside her veins that made her disappear into the ether where memories of a son's love and of bonds unattended are too hazy to know or feel would be obsolete and she would stay clean and the overdose that came  one year later would never need to happen because she would feel loved and contented.