Fearless Confessions: A Writer's Guide to Memoir

SIX: Mock Moons and Metaphor: Crafting Memoir into Art

Chapter Six --------------------------------------------------------------Mock Moons and Metaphor Crafting Memoir into Art ne night, unable to sleep, I watch an autumn moon framed in my bedroom window in Michigan. It pauses, large and luminous, as if hovering just on the other side of the glass. I am startled: I haven’t noticed the moon for a long time, haven’t followed its journey across its home in the night sky. Now seemingly so close, so intimate, I almost believe, if I breathe deeply, I’ll be able to smell it. I sense it—cool, heavy—anchoring the sky, anchoring me, with blue dreams of the universe. But the moon is not blue. Whatcolor,objectively,isit?Iwonder.Darkwhite?Graywhite?Itry to remember facts about the moon. What information, discovered by nasa scientists and astronauts, have I read in newspapers and magazines ?WhatpictureshaveIseenbeamedfromitssurface?Ithinkabout getting out of bed, switching on my computer, and Googling “moon,” toseewhatdatacanberetrieved,notfrommypersonalobservedspace, but from cyberspace. I do not get out of bed. I don’t want objective information about the moon. All that matters at the moment is what the moon means to me. Shouldn’t I rely on the observation of my own senses? Now, as the hour grows later, most of the moon shines in one pane of glass, the remainder in another. In this split image, a glimmer of reflected light leaks behind the orb, causing a fuzzy boundary, blurring mock moons and metaphor 69 perception, so that I observe one large moon trailed by a smaller one, this slur of moon a mock moon, more enchanting than the moon itself. For it is a personal moon that only I can see in the glass of my own window. Iwanttofeelthismoon.Iwanttotouchit.Tasteit.Sinceitisnowmy personalmoon,Iimagineitablueberry-freezemarbleorasweetchunk of rock candy, cool as blue ice. I wonder why, when I see or imagine the moon, my synesthetic heart feels the word “blue”? I allow my mind to unfocus. To drift. To journey where sensory association, personal metaphor, lure me, flowing from image to image: from moon, to heart, to lonely heart, to empty nights, to blue nights, to blue moons. Unfettered , my memory floats to specific moments when the moon and my heart blued. In this late-night, semi-dream state, it is as if I tumble out my bedroom window here in Michigan, a window of time, to be imaginatively cast into other places. Other times. I travel backward. To childhood. To adolescence. To other nights. I yearn to understand all my moons. I feel a need not only to search for other moons but, more importantly, to discover why a blue moon seems a metaphor that links particular sections of my life together. What does “blue moon” mean to me? The only way to discover the answer to this question is to write. So I pick up my pad of paper, letting my mind drift. I follow lines of words, luxuriating in billowing strands of connotative memory, as I travel from this moon in Michigan to nights that still linger in shadows of my mind. In order to know what blue moons mean, to understand the importance of this image, to discover the metaphors, I must write and see where I am led. ---------On Caribbean nights, as a young island girl in the West Indies, I watch the moon darken with arcing branches of royal poinciana and frangipani trees. The Caribbean moon blues with reflected water from the viridianandturquoisesea.Mymother,ill,leavesmeforhospitalization in the States, far away. Lying in bed in a froth of mosquito netting, in a roomwithopenshutters,themoonseemstowatchme—watchesover 70 mock moons and metaphor me—through long, blue tropical nights. I reach toward it, imagine I grasp it. I am tugged by it, along with the tides, as if it carries me to my mother on the other side of the sea. Oncebidden,onceencouraged,onceinvited,howswiftlythisimage evolves as I retrieve the past. Even as I sense the moon outside my bedroom in Michigan, still I search for its personal meaning to me. Now, I see—and write—of a teenager in New Jersey, a girl full of longing for sad, teenage songs. How clearly I now remember dancing across a high school gym to the strains of the song “Blue Moon” with Jamie, my boyfriend.Myfeetslowto Blue moon, I saw you standing alone . . .Ismell Jamie’s scent of Ivory soap and Aqua Velva, see his short-clipped blond hair, the small overlap...