i carry your heart with me

We were living in the two bedroom termite motel when Sean was born, but I have said all this before. The only true room was the living room.  The only vivid memories I force foggy.  Sean was an infant, less then a year, and my parents were out somewhere - work maybe - or at one of those early AA meetings. We had a babysitter. It stands out in my mind. It would be the last time we ever had a stranger watch us.  Something was going on - something more then my 3 year old self could understand, but there was anger and frustration and protection.  The teenage girl went to put Sean in the crib. She was hazardous. She smacked his infant head against the wood paneling of the doorway. It was an accident. It was overwhelming. Megan lurched for Sean. Stole him out of her careless arms. I remember my sister yelling. Sending the babysitter home. Suspending her form her duties, the shift was over. Megan was 9 and our mother.

We upgraded the family. Bigger house, nicer cars, sober parents. We went to church and dinner, together.  One night, sitting in the rec room, looking out onto the off limits living room, I sat with the volatile form of my father. He was checking my multiplication homework. My answers were wrong. This was uncommon, I did not fail, especially in his presence. He became righteously angry. He crumbled the ditto and threw it across the fresh carpet, "If you are going to do sh*t work then you can hand in a piece of sh*t" (oh such a lovely man he could be) And I was sent to my room. I couldn't cry, he would think that a tactic I used against him, to make him feel sorry and remorseful. So I was silent, stepped over the homework trash and forced sleep upon me. My mother was at work. My sisters swept in. Kelly cursed him and screamed and told him angry truths in deafening tones. Megan found my ditto. Ironed the wrinkles and pain and judgment from the messy math assignment, pressed it between encyclopedia pages, checked on my sleeping self, and then went to find Kelly - who had now been kicked out.  Megan was 15 and our mother.

I was most excited when she went away to college. Although scared that her protective arms would be just out of reach, I knew she earned and deserved it. All of it - from philosophy classes in Belgium, internships at the Baltimore Sun and Summa Cum Laude at graduation. Everything she had, she earned, and she taught me perseverance.  She painted passion with determination and she read me e.e. cummings. She would cut shapes out of yellow construction paper and send me Tulips and Chimneys. I fell in love with the way he abused grammar. His eccentric following of the rules. His voice.

Soon after college, Megan moved to the city, and she met him - her corresponding puzzle piece.  Eight years of Brooklyn and Queens, Argentina, Faithless, Massive Attack, Hold Steady, parents divorcing, siblings destructing, parties and sobriety, death, life, dieing.  They are getting married this weekend, in the shadows of their first date, on the cobbled streets of the East River. And they asked me to pick a reading. For the couple who travels the world and my sister, my best friend, my second mother, i carry your heart with me(i carry it in my heart).