“Don’t get upset, I want to tell you something,” is what my mother always says as a prelude to the tiniest pieces of advice, invariably unwanted. She thinks that if she can impart her myriad rules, gathered together, they will build for you a life worth living. When to drink before and after a meal, the medicinal qualities of kitchen spices that she may have read in a magazine or heard from an immigrant friend who has long been pouring milk in her tea. A quilt sewn from diamond scraps, each missing from the wider fabric within which it was once whole.
Perhaps she knows, at some level hidden even to herself, that my reasoning and hers parted ways long ago, long before this moment when we face each other over the last unsealed box. It’s been ten years of upheaval, tenuous equilibrium and rebirth, and how often have you been this close? How much do you know about a life still carried on the slash and burn momentum of brutal youth, fertilised on fresh ashes. I ask myself, how much more of this, how much more of this before… before what exactly? Whatever she is telling me this time, my mind has already reached a far beyond place and most of the boxes already sealed.
**
“William, where are you?”
“Somewhere else,” I reply and my voice traveled through walls, passed unlit rooms and my sleeping grandmother before I realized how true this was.
“I wanted to drink tea and eat nuts,” she said, summoning me for shared moments. The darkness of low cloud and unceasing rain now thickened by oncoming night. In her disembodied, plaintive voice, she’s alone in the kitchen, I hear a parting of the ways, and I leave what I am doing to join her.
One Comment
you join her at last:)