My mother made this purple poncho. She was not my mother. She was my “legal guardian,” my biological grandmother, my birth father’s mother, the woman who raised me (or the main one who ignored me for most of my childhood). But she made this poncho for me when I was 16 years old—you can see it in the yearbook from my junior year of high school—and I have worn it for years to keep me warm, long after her emotions died with the death of her daughters, her body died from heartbreak, even after her spirit stopped haunting her grandchildren.

She took a square of stripey purple, alpine fleece. She cut a hole for the neck and stitched it round with purple yarn. This much, at least, would not have taken her long. But the fringe. That must have taken her hours on end—longer a sustained effort than any other she spent on me, perhaps. She—who was always sewing, who spent eight months making quilts by hand for friends for free, for coworkers, for my younger sister, but who finally had to be shamed into making one for me that she died without finishing (she sent it away to the Amish to bind, and they finished the edges with quilted hearts that would have made her vomit to see)—but she spent weeks and weeks adding purple yarn fringe to a purple poncho.

The result is atrocious, and no one sees it, anymore, who’s not inside my inner sanctum.

We lived in Southwest Florida, and I was feral as a panther. The moment I turned 18, I raced away to North Carolina, to Louisiana, Vermont, New York, Massachusetts, Colorado, New Mexico, and all the way, finally, to Northern California where I had to either stop running or start swimming. She died almost as soon as I left, as though my presence was a magnetizing force, holding her particles together. The world has felt cold ever since.     

And yet, after more than twenty years, I still have this purple poncho, and it still keeps me warm.

P.L. Watts earned a Lambda Literary Fellowship for Emerging LGBTQ Writers, and her personal essays have appeared in Nightmare Magazine, New Letters, The Florida Review, and elsewhere. Her first novella is forthcoming from Cemetery Gates.