A monument wants to be souvenired.

“The souvenir speaks to a context of origin through a language of longing, for it is not an object arising out of need or use value; it is an object arising out of the necessarily insatiable demands of nostalgia,” Susan Stewart writes in On Longing.

Love wants to be remembered. Barthes believes this. He feels a duty to remember his mother, and to immortalize her in the project he never finished, the book she was supposed to star in, Vita Nova.

My mother said this explicity: “To me, the way you know someone is loved is that family remembers them when they die.”

This is not an fuzzy statement — it’s not unclear, blurry, or vague. It is a clear expression of her wish to be kept alive in our minds. There are many ways to do this, but none of them are related to our own personal needs for “closure”, which is the nice American way to describe erasure in therapy-speak.

On April 12, 1978, as Barthes wrote these words, my mother was in labor with me. She sat on the curb outside a Bucharest hospital and smoked her last cigarette before entering. I was born in the early morning hours of April 13th.

"Nests are a tragedy waiting to happen.” Ellen Dore Watson says this in her poem "He Watches Them."

The poem’s title includes two pronouns — like blank holes in a mask, all we know is the watching will happen.

The tawny owl hunts at night because its prey comes out. The hunter is guided by the actions of what it predates. It waits for the wood mouse who feeds on nuts and beetles. The barred owl moved into the tree close to our bedroom window after mom died. Sometimes I stayed up listening to it.

In an essay, “Wanting Wrong,” Anna Enright describes an “anxiety about consent” that runs through a book by Miranda Popkey, and focuses on how this anxiety might actually be centered in concerns about the “agony of others.” Enright calls it “the flower dilemma: you cannot ask a man to give you flowers, because to do so undoes the sense of a gift.”

You cannot ask a man to tie you up without complicating his intentionality if he agrees to your wish.

My mother thought being loved would keep her alive, but I know better. Hate is the thing which does not die— humans remember their own wounds better than they remember any fellow human being.

I want you to hate me.

And remember me.

I am here for whatever monument you wish to erect.

At night, the cloud looks down on the tree and whispers, “Look, I have memorized your crown. When they cut you down, I will remain as a moving monument. Others who knew you will recognize your silhouette in me…”