Birthday gift from beyond?

"Beat by beat, she emptied her most vital organ into my ear".  -me.

Coming back from work today, as the horse show has been set up, I decided to stop by & ask if I could pet the horses, since I can’t afford $300 to see a show right now.  It’s been wishful thinking to see it, like a child wanting to see a circus & having a giant monster blocking its entrance.  You must’ve seen from where you are how this is a fantastic version of my childhood circuses. The ones you’d take me to.

One of the attendants told me it wasn’t possible; only trainers are authorized to interact with the horses. As I turned to leave, he said that during the last 10 days of the show, they let people in for $30. Said days fall on the week of my birthday. I’m going.  Having left, I was buried by the feeling that you won’t be with me to go see this amazing thing that you’d have loved.  This should’ve been something we shared.

At home,  I turned on the music channel and Abba’s  "The Winner Takes It All" plays.  I’m crying so much that I’m having a hard time breathing.  My eyes end up swelling shut.  MT even called me on Skype & I didn’t hear it at first.  She suggested that the opportunity of a $30 ticket was your birthday gift to me (something I’d ever so briefly entertained coming back from there), that I deserved it (something you said to me during our very last shopping trip together), but she doesn’t step down from her psychoanalyst soap box: that I have to forgive myself; that you, when saying  you’d given up on love, were not referring to that which I’d denied you for years, but to that which formed your life history (please!); that she’d lived through this same pain at an earlier age than me (as if that entitled her or she were still living it); that I have to forge ahead, etc.

Moments ago I stumbled upon American Idol (my frustrated dream), which I’m not watching this season. It’s become a circus (not the good kind). An otherworldly amazing kid, Cortez Shaw, sang a song that’s new for me ("Titanium"). I have not stopped playing it for an hour. Maybe it’s because I see myself reflected in it; because it speaks of how strongly I am your daughter – without mentioning a single word of it.

I’m bullet proof, nothing to lose –
fire away, fire away;
ricochet, you take your aim…

shoot me down, but I won’t fall,
I am titanium…