Soon it
will be
full moon
again 

I watch you rummage through the dark brown earth with your green gloves, blow away the strand of hair that falls into your face, the strand that is no longer blonde but gray, how the gray keeps falling into your face and you keep blowing it away until you run out of air or patience and you fix the gray under your red and green dotted reading glasses, which get lost in the nest on your head.  

“You have to earn your gray hair—I'm not going to let some hairdresser take that away from me,” you said with as much conviction as you said:  

“We don't eat meat anymore because cows can remember faces.”  

As if the Bolognese in your belly full of spaghetti Bolognese could remember your face. Your face, contorted with concentration as you stood in front of the refrigerated section at the supermarket, wearing your red and green dotted reading glasses that had slipped down to the tip of your nose, examining the packages for the best animal welfare grade while blowing the gray strands of hair out of your face.  

You smile at me, happy here in your world of green and brown and red and blond. 

I only see gray. 

I don't know what to talk about. 

I don't know who you are.  

 

Back when I still knew who you were, you explained to me that fertilizer isn't fertilizer and that you love your garden when the tomatoes are small and the soil is free of chemicals. 

 

I'm angry with you because you betrayed our principles. Betrayed to him who sang `Biene Maya´ at the top of his voice on car journeys, carried me on his shoulders at the swimming pool, had the remains of my spaghetti ice cream in his moustache on vacation, and played the evil, hissing dragon when I, as a knight, rescued you as a princess from the dragon's cave. In my world, there were always just the three of us, even in my fairy tales there were three of us, until one day he invited a fourth person into our fairy tale, a vague shadow, a silhouette without a face, without a name, because I was too young to name what you knew. What you knew, kept secret, forgave, and forgot. A betrayal of you, of your principles, which became my principles because I didn't know where you began and I ended. Because I believed, without knowing everything, accepted without questioning. And now I stand here in front of you and I'm not angry with him, not disappointed in him! I'm angry with you, who should be better, must be strong, should respect yourself, should follow the right path, the moral compass in my little world of spaghetti ice cream and `Biene Maya´. 

I don't know where to go anymore. 

I don't know who you are. 

 

 

Back then, when I still knew who you were, you whispered conspiratorially that it would soon be a full moon and we could finally plant your seedlings. 

 

Now you are no longer everything to me. Not my opinion, not my advice, not my truth, not my direction. Completely detached from you, I stand there, I have detached myself from “Mom, how do you do...?” and “Mom, what do you think...?” and “Mom, could you...?” because if only you do and only you think, I don't know what I can do. If only you answer, I don't know what to ask. If I am what you believe in, and you betray what you believe in, what is left of me? 

“You are a strong woman, and that's good, because you have to fight for respect in this world. You are not what others do, not what others say, you are you, however you want to be.”
 

How do I fight for respect for your decisions that make you seem so weak and him so strong? I don't understand you anymore, I don't understand myself anymore. So I tear down everything you've ever said and realize that it remains because so much of me is you—and that makes me angry, so angry that I pull everything that is you out of me. I pull and pull, spinning like a red and green spool of yarn, spinning and spinning and getting thinner and thinner until I stop spinning because I'm so thin that nothing remains.  

That's how I see you, naked, thin, and free. 

I don't know who I am. 

 

Back when I still knew who I was, I secretly went into the garden and fertilized the seedlings with chemicals under the full moon. 

 

 

At night, alone at my window, in my small shared apartment room, on the fourth floor, in a dark street full of acacia trees, in a city hundreds of kilometers away from you, I searched for answers to questions that only you could answer. In stuffy student bars, under dim lights and with sticky fingers from the bar, I found questions I never dared to ask because I thought you would answer everything I needed to know. I slowly began to unwind again, and I am colorful. Green like the acacia trees on my street, brown like the sticky bar in the student pub, red like the windowsill in my little shared apartment, blonde like you used to be, and gray like the sky when I sit at my window and think of you. I slowly unravel again, and I become thick because I unravel what is new, what is old, what I am, and what you are. We get tangled up because I've learned to disagree with you without rejecting everything, because I wind up what we are and unwind what you alone are. 

And for a brief moment, I feel sorry for us. 

I don't know who we are. 

 

Back when I still knew who we were, we ate tomatoes in the summer.  

You smiled at me and were proud because this year we had managed to turn the little green plants into juicy red ones. 

I smiled back at you because I knew that from now on I would secretly fertilize the little plants every year, because I didn't want to take away your pride in our gardening progress.
 

Last year, I didn't fertilize them. 

We didn't eat tomatoes, we didn't smile at each other. 

Soon it will be full moon again. 

I look at you and think: “Tomorrow I'll go to the gardening center and get fertilizer, the good kind with lots of chemicals.”