Eyebrows

My fingers explode into a thousand memories. A starburst nebula of all that you have been.
My first everything is encapsulated by all of you. Center of my universe. The original tableau from which the stars were strung.My mum.

We drive each day to the same place. You want your Grande Latte and I provide the mechanism for which your desire is granted and obtained. Some days my entire body revolts against the monotony of where it is that you want me to go, or what it is that you want me to do, or who it is you want me to pretend to be. But I bite my tongue.

The children are more vocal of their displeasure of the new routine. They don't want to be caged in this place where each day we sit with Granny and do nothing but wait to eat. They want to be outside. In the sun. They want to be with their friends, running amok in the streets. Boundlessly bouncing on a random trampoline.

I corral their seemingly selfish desires and speak to them words that I too need to hear in my heart. This time will pass all too fast. This time escapes every feeble attempt to contain it. It marches forward with its own impetus, with blatant disregard to our stupid feelings, our senseless emotions or our vociferous cries of "foul!" and "no fair!". The time engulfs all of our plans for the future, how we thought that things or normality would be. It erodes such mundane seeming possibilities and replaces them instead with questions that we do not care to answer or with riddles to which it seems that there could never be a sensible solution.

In the car, in the fading afternoon sun, on our gorgeous plateau, where the horizon fades into an endless expanse of sky, I watch her face. A favourite thing of mine is to grab the faces of people that I love. I squish them between my hands, I tickle ears and squeeze earlobes between my index finger and my thumb. Her blue sapphires contain all the mysteries of a hidden universe, a nation of only one, a nation now without a voice, where her desires are only to be guessed at, her needs interpreted by intuition and common sense.

I look ahead to the red light in front, then turn to her, and spread my fingers across her eyebrows and down over her eyes. A sweeping gesture that my children loved. She loves it too. She slowly closes her eyes and laughs. She turns her face towards me for more.

The moment that my fingers touched her brow they became electrified by the personification of the loss that is going to be her. You feel that loss is this thing that you should prepare yourself for, for in the future, that it will come on one day, that you should appreciate every day now whilst you can. But what you don't realize is that the loss is already here and now with you, in this present. It is a sadness that seeps into the fibers of who you are and it changes the way that you deal with life, with how you carry yourself, that which you can handle as a person, and with what you can tolerate.

The loss makes you a target for other people to prey on your weakness, to use you for your kindness, to take advantage of your inability to protect yourself. You don't realize you are weak. In fact, other people may not realize you are weak at all, they may mistakenly marvel at your ability to cope or at your strength. They do not see the cracks in the veneer or feel the ache in your soul. They think that death (especially of a parent) is a natural part of life. And whilst this is true, I can honestly say they only feel that, because they never had a mother like you.