Build Your Own

A story about leaving, finding, and beginning again
The video lived in that narrow, bruised space between memory and humiliation, the kind of thing that doesn’t just embarrass you but rearranges you. I wore my mother’s old apron because I always wore it, because the apron was a faded blue with tiny white flowers that had once been bright and a small tear near the pocket where she used to tuck a folded recipe card, and if I pressed my face into it when no one was watching I could still catch something of her, a ghost of her perfume or maybe just the memory of it, which was almost the same thing when you were desperate. I was setting the table the way I always did, moving with the instinct of practice: our dining room table was too big for the room, a long rectangle of scuffed wood that belonged to a house bigger than ours, and my mother had called it sturdy with a kind of tenderness, as if it were a person. Every year I dragged it from the wall and laid out the place settings that never matched because she had collected dishes the way other people collected postcards, one pretty plate here, one inherited bowl there, always making a meal look like a celebration even on an ordinary Wednesday.