06-30-2021, 11:27 AM
she looks like sleep to the freezing
He does not hesitate. (Though, had she really thought he would?)
It is a memory, she understands this without knowing how. Except that the child looks like him before the eruption of all that bone. And this is his mother? It must be, given the way grief grips them -- all three of them, the two left behind and her, too, the interloper. But she feels it only because they feel it. She feels it only because he wants her to feel it. This is what hurts. Losing your mother in the dawn hours of your life. She cannot relate.
The child nudges its mother but it is no use. This is what hurts. This is the kind of pain that seizes the heart, arrests the air in the lungs. This is the kind of pain that you have no choice but to carry with you through the rest of your life, she realizes.
And then he blinks and the memory dissolves around them and they are grown and he is no longer that child and she can no longer feel the grief sloughing off him in waves. There is something in the eyes, though. Or, rather, the lack of something in the eyes. A stretching nothingness. As if he is suddenly keeping something from her. She studies them, those eyes, and shakes her head.
“No,” she answers honestly. She does not know what it means to lose someone, let alone her mother. Could she numb herself to it now? She could not have numbed herself to it as a child, before. Before the winter consumed her. Became her. It sounds like an accusation and one corner of her mouth quirks upward in a knowing smile.
“I was not always numb,” she tells him. (Is she numb now? Or is she only cold?) “Certainly if I had lost my mother at that age, I would not have been okay either.”
It is a memory, she understands this without knowing how. Except that the child looks like him before the eruption of all that bone. And this is his mother? It must be, given the way grief grips them -- all three of them, the two left behind and her, too, the interloper. But she feels it only because they feel it. She feels it only because he wants her to feel it. This is what hurts. Losing your mother in the dawn hours of your life. She cannot relate.
The child nudges its mother but it is no use. This is what hurts. This is the kind of pain that seizes the heart, arrests the air in the lungs. This is the kind of pain that you have no choice but to carry with you through the rest of your life, she realizes.
And then he blinks and the memory dissolves around them and they are grown and he is no longer that child and she can no longer feel the grief sloughing off him in waves. There is something in the eyes, though. Or, rather, the lack of something in the eyes. A stretching nothingness. As if he is suddenly keeping something from her. She studies them, those eyes, and shakes her head.
“No,” she answers honestly. She does not know what it means to lose someone, let alone her mother. Could she numb herself to it now? She could not have numbed herself to it as a child, before. Before the winter consumed her. Became her. It sounds like an accusation and one corner of her mouth quirks upward in a knowing smile.
“I was not always numb,” she tells him. (Is she numb now? Or is she only cold?) “Certainly if I had lost my mother at that age, I would not have been okay either.”
camellia
@Reave