Rome, Italy
I am tangled up in time. My body is the fine silver of my necklace, tying knots through curls of hair. I am the feeling of trying to untangle its spindled chain with too thick fingers, tips all pink, reaching for a dexterity they just don’t have. I’m caught up like that. Strangled.
Maybe it’s the streets of Rome. Their cobblestone spines and winding whimsy. Nothing is a grid in this city. When we sit down to eat dinner at 7:30PM, we’re the only ones there. I am looking at a stone that existed before Jesus. I am looking at a stone that is making me do some mangled time math, when did Jesus exist? Why do we all care so much? Who the fuck was Jesus?
Maybe it’s the phase of the moon. The summer solstice and the full moon fall on the same night this year. It is the longest day and the brightest night all at once and I want this to mean something so badly. I’m not even sure what. My mama always loved the moon. Together we’d sit on flannel sheets on the top bunk and wave to outer space. “I love you to the moon and back,” she’d tell me, and I’d wonder how long that kind of love would take.
Maybe it’s the month of June.
My necklace has a thin silver chain and a pendant made of sapphires. My mommy says she knew that my mama was ready to die when she gave away her jewelry. I can see it all so vividly. It’s happening now, in June, not then, in June, time is collapsing, June is June is June. I’m sticky in June’s web, tangled, caught, strangled.
June: We are in the living room of my childhood home. My mama wears a terrycloth blue bathrobe and through it, I can see her stomach, bloated like the moon. She is stretched across a couch, her limbs so thin and pointed they seem to argue with her torso. My mama doesn’t want to die on July 4th weekend. “It’s a holiday,” she says.
June: Beside my mama, my mommy sits on the floor. She stretches her neck to bring her face closer to my mama’s face. They look like they were made to be a pair. Our hospice nurse is seated on the tan leather chair that’s not nearly as comfortable as it looks. “You don’t have to wait,” my mommy tells my mama. And I know, this kind of love could circle the moon too many times to count.
June: Across from my moms, I sit, awash with impossibilities. I disintegrate, and disperse, and the little particles that used to be me float like dust mites through the air. I am more here than I have ever been anywhere. My mama picks a day. “June 30th,” she says.
On a chair that wobbles over the cobblestones of Rome, I finger the necklace that my mama unclasped from her neck and re-clasped around mine on the day she chose the day that she would die. Then she took her engagement ring off of her finger and slid it onto the same finger on my mommy’s hand. Their fingers are not the same size, but the ring fit them both perfectly. What I’m saying is, the laws of time and physics do not always apply.
Jessica Petrow-Cohen is a Pushcart-nominated creative nonfiction writer. Her essay “On Molting,” was the winner of the 2024 Kenyon Review’s Short Nonfiction Contest and her senate testimony on behalf of same-sex marriage was published in The New York Times. Her writing has also appeared or is forthcoming in publications including The Kenyon Review, Brevity, The Washington Post, Working Artist Mag, and her Substack, “Claiming Writerhood.” Her work has been supported by The Virginia Center for Creative Arts, The Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, and The Vermont Studio Center.
