ByMadelynGrace

I.

Before the other day, I hadn’t seen my mother since I walked away from her sobbing my name before a thunderstorm months ago, when I went back to my hometown because my father was selling the home I grew up in. Though they no longer live there together, and I think that’s why he left. 

Last week, she came to visit me in New York, where I’ve begun to have what she called “a whole life.” She isn’t wrong. My absorption into the city in the year I’ve been here even shocks me. I need not wring the cold dry towel in trying to explain why our relationship is so tumultuous, just know that it all causes me great pain. So I avoid it, just like any good anxious person. 

For the past year, her number was blocked on my cellphone. I could no longer handle the surprise texts from her in paragraphs telling me how much she loved me, and how sorry she was for what had happened in the fire that was my family. “I love you” was a weapon, and it hurt. We’d often go stints without speaking, the silence always forced on her by me. Sometimes I imagine how many messages never found deliverance. In terms of her, I can’t help speaking like God. 

II.

Part of my whole life is seeing shows I think I have to see for no reason other than feigned importance. One of these is the Armory, which I went to for the first time last year thanks to my best friend’s job at a Chelsea gallery and their free VIP tickets. This year, I went again thanks to the same benefactor, though my friend no longer works there. 

Art fairs are difficult. It all feels like a robbery. An all you can eat buffet in a cattle farm that pops up with the summer carnival in the church’s parking lot. I’m breathing right behind someone’s asshole and everybody is rubbing elbows just the same. Commercialization hangs quilts up like my grandmother once made by hand and a guard stands watch with crossed arms while the fight is really with the galleries across the way: Hey! You’re blocking my view!

Art fairs are funny. I wish I could have grabbed a glass of wine and strolled with my arm in a stranger’s, making small talk over color. It’s too overwhelming for me. I go to an art fair and I get so high I’m numb. But this year, I wasn’t just a witness—I was robbed, too. 

I walked past a booth from a gallery I don’t know who won an award I don’t remember. I will commit to my forgetfulness for the sake of anonymity and a point that supersedes the name. Gridded lines projected from the surfaces of the floor and the wall until several Times New Roman lined printer paper caught me in their text. 

A mother writes letters to her daughter. She apologizes for her absence. She commends her daughter’s being. They are doting. These letters remind me of the many I’d received from my mother, many of which I’d unearthed in my childhood bedroom, all of the same material encasing similar pain. I’d recently begun writing to her again. It had become the only means of communication between us, for I was able to be so close to the page, package it up, and send it far away. I remember the first letter I got from her at my new address in Brooklyn. I started sobbing as soon as I saw the handwriting. 

I don’t know the context of these letters I’m reading behind white frames. I am often moved viscerally, but seldom tangibly. Reading these words and hearing my mother’s, I begin to cry. 

When I get to the press release, I learn the “series of goodbye letters [the artist] asked her relatives, friends, and ChatGPT to write as if from her deceased mother after her death.” As if! As if is world’s away from what is. All I can see is the final author who taints the whole picture. I feel dirty. I walk away. I go to work. 

III.

Tonight at work a woman asks if I ever write my dreams down. She tells me I can customize a ChatGPT (a different acronym I don’t care to write down) to put my dreams through Freud, Jung, and universal symbolism. Apparently, “what it says is crazy!” And I believe her. But I argue. Of course, I bring in Lacan.

”It isn’t the interpretation of the dream that gives it meaning, but the interpreting,” I emphasize the action. “Your ‘symbols’ are only ever yours. Even if they fit into an archetype, they’re filled with and by you. Using A.I. to make the meaning for you is skipping over the exact process that makes meaning in the first place. ChatGPT isn’t you.”

I’m getting redundant. I can’t remember the rest. The man she’s holding hands with next to her is high-fiving me across the table and invites me to dinner next week. It won’t follow through. He’s had a few martinis and I’m pretty sure they just did a few lines in the bathroom. I’m talking like they’ll remember and maybe they will even if they don’t know it. I point to a red light outside, and see the dress I bought that afternoon. 

My mother would love this, I think about mostly everything I do.