Mother

The room was so barren and the woman in her late fifties hadn’t felt smaller or more lost than she did at this moment. Walls once considered being a playful peanut butter and jelly scheme now stretched and grew, instilling bitter thoughts in the woman’s mind of shared anguish with the likes of Alice in Wonderland as she too watched the world enlarge far beyond her control. It hurt the back of her throat to be in the bedroom, staring at the spot where her child used to lay. She even hesitated to sink heavily down onto the Egyptian cotton, standing numbly in front of the twin bed. The purple sheets were still mussed from when her daughter had taken her final slumber at home, a preservation of what physically remained. Gravity won over and, with only a semblance of her regret, the mattress gave way to the wearied woman’s small frame. The emptiness was real, far more real than the melancholy imaginings of a beaten mind, for her child had said she’d wanted to take home with her when she left and so had packed up the room like she was moving away.

Away had been temporary at first, four weeks of missing a child that would return, whether she wanted to or not, from the new adventure of art school. That grasp on the future ran off quick and fast, falling from between the mother’s pale fingers like the ground quartz sand of the beach they used to walk on when dusk fell. As if visualizing this escaping sand, the woman gritted her teeth and clenched her fists together, trying to hold back that next wave of tears that wanted to pour from her dehydrated body. Home was gone for her daughter and for her, now and forever more.