Send My Love to Anyone

1 week ago | sendmylovetoanyone.substack.com | Kathryn Mockler

My grandmother Shirley, sitting on the brown-tweed couch in our living room. The memory is warm and blurry. She’s giving me a doll wearing a yellow dress, and the doll seems giant because I’m just a toddler. It’s the only memory I have from a first-person viewpoint, other than an upsetting one, a few years later, involving a lot of blood. From then on, my memories appear as though I’m watching myself from overhead, so that first one is particularly important to me.

2 weeks ago | sendmylovetoanyone.substack.com | Kathryn Mockler

The earliest memory I can access at this point is being in the hospital to get my tonsils out when I was four. One day I was part of a group of children who the staff set loose in a room full of toys. The slightly older and much more rambunctious boys immediately took over all the most interesting toys, leaving me with an empty toy holster which I just sat by the wall and looked at. Does looking at a holster in a hospital count? Probably not.

2 weeks ago | sendmylovetoanyone.substack.com | Kathryn Mockler

I was lying on the floor of my uncle and aunt’s apartment in Hong Kong. There was an open door to the balcony, and there were these sheer white curtains blowing. I moved myself right underneath those curtains and just watched them dancing above me. Sometimes the wind would die down, and the curtains fell on my face. It was so exquisite to me. I became conscious of a self, a moment, beauty. I wrote a poem in Grade 5 about Helen Keller. I was obsessed with Helen Keller.

2 weeks ago | sendmylovetoanyone.substack.com | Kathryn Mockler

Yesterday I was waiting for the bus alone at a bus stop, and a man came up to me and started talking at me about some electric bike he was going to buy. He kept standing closer and closer to me as he talked even though I kept moving away. I wish I could have been the type to tell him to leave me alone. Perhaps in another mood or moment I would have, but on a day I'm visiting my mother in the hospital while she waits for a spot in long term care, I'm just too tired for a confrontation.

2 weeks ago | sendmylovetoanyone.substack.com | Kathryn Mockler

Yesterday I took the day off from visiting my mother. It’s hard to do, but I have to if I am going to survive putting my life entirely on hold until she gets a bed in a care home. A friend asked me if I wanted to do a reading while I was in London. At first I thought it would be a great idea, but then I canceled in the middle of the night when I woke up in a panic. I’m barely functioning.