Mother, The Moments I

The mother is in the ward again. And she cradles the two bundles and wonders how she, and the love of her life standing next to her now, holding her hand and gazing where she is gazing, have created this. First they had each other. Then they had them. And now, surely, they had everything.

Mother, The Moments II

She comes back sleepy from the long day helping out at the school. Of course the mother is tired as well. She has just spent an entire day at work, with a lazy boss who leaves everything to her and almost all her colleagues new and therefore mostly useless as she puts it. But she listens to her daughter's accounts, starting slow and tired but rising to an excited high pitch, of her day, all the sweet moments and all the sour ones. She takes a picture of her at home because she has had to dress up for this and looks all grown up in a smart suit and black high heels. The daughter blushes and complains and tells her not to bother but she smiles and does it anyway, and thinks about all those times.

She

SHE sees all the people around her and she stands and props up a wall, wishing that it would support her instead. She sees all the smiles, she grasps for goodbyes, and she hungers for hugs and helloes. 
And she cries silently and she is surpised when her tears don't even freeze on her icy cheeks, frosty from her broken heart, her beaten lungs. 
She is thinking the words even then, the same words over and over and over, till they run into a stream together, all mixed and jumbled up, just like her, and go on endless stretching forth. 
She knows this:
That she will stop thinking now because if she thought any more it would bring everything back and it would hurt so much, it would hurt so much that she wouldn't think about anything else in numb agony, and she knows that when she smiles then it'll be a grimace in disguise. 
This is what happens. 

Who am I? 
Who are we and what are we doing here anyway? 
My right hand has got tendon problems making it weak and painful and almost infected at times. My knees have been completely wasted absorbing impact. My heart has been broken into a million pieces and you, yes you, you stupid people I was foolish enough to love, you have gone and walked all over it every single time you breathe a breath or speak a word or lift a finger. And you have left dust. 
Nothing but dust. Even though it used to be something so precious you have made it into dust; you have made ne nothing - you have made me realize and you have poured enough tears down my lungs to not drown me but to force me to acknowledge that I am nothing. 
Silence. Words. Smiles.
Silence.
One last word. 
Isn't it funny how SWS is so similar to SOS, but nobody would even think it was a typo?

And yet she smiles. She surfaces and that is all she can even think of doing.

Mother, The Moments III

THE queues are thriving, winding like a live snake curling and and twisting to avoid tables and chairs instead of rocks and weed. The cinema is thronging with mobs of people, all here to end the new year with a few hours together gazing up at a screen instead of at each other, but with heads leaning on shoulders and rough fingers suddenly gently playing with soft curly hair, or cuddles away from the cold and when the scene gets too scary.
Here they are faced with a problem. The mother wants to watch Sherlock Holmes; she says while her husband doesn't know it would be great to spend a while ogling Jude Law, and Robert Downey Jr. as well, of course. The kids, a pair of twins, smile faintly at their mother's adorable attempts at getting them out of their books and into the reality - of boys and dating. In truth she is only worried that they will never be bringing back any guy, not even the type with bad acne and a 'cool' fringe that blocked his line of vision to the extreme. Of course each one of the adolescents has already set her eyes previously on some guy from somewhere, one of those confounded camps they mysteriously didn't reveal anything about willingly, from their tuition lesson group or guitar musical gathering. But of course they don't know that. They just wonder at having such a crazy mother.
They want to watch... Alvin and the Chipmunks 2: Chipmunks vs. Chippettes. Heavy-heartedly she tells them in a light tone that she'd love to watch the Chipmunks. And she will go online and book tickets got Sherlock Holmes late that night after they are changed and safely, snugly tucked away in bed.

What Have You Done?

THIS is it, guys. We've almost come full circle; we are now hours away from 2010. I keep repeating to my family members, "There's only 2 and three quarters more hours left of 2009! There's only 2 and a half more hours left of 2009! There's only 2 hours and 29 minutes left of 2009!" At this rate I am going to have a cushion thrown at me pretty soon, but I just can't contain my feelings. Feelings, because honestly, I don't really know how I feel about the new year - the new decade in fact.
My Mama, my twin sister and I are all gathered in her room. My Papa is in one of his cleaning moods where he basically
cleans everything in sight - except for the single kitchen sink I keep spotless with an eagerness that everyone claims is nearing the ranking of OCD. Right now I believe he's vaccuuming the whole place - he'll mop it next then come in and let it dry for a while, forced to delay his cleaning for a while.
I just had a look around this place. This room, this home. I've lived in it all my life and I don't really know if I've appreciated all the things that have come to me, delivered by sunny mornings and yellow-dressed afternoons, here. I think this is a perfect time to be really thinking about things. It's a perfect time to meditate on what I have been doing and obviously what I am going to be doing next year. But that part will come later, when the proverbial bridge has come, ready to be crossed.
I have done some things that I haven't had time in the restless throes and fights of yet-another-city-day, to regret. I find that even regret, that slight bitterness tinging, but not tarnishing, the warmth of a summer's day, is beautiful in itself. Even as she sits and she pours her heart out into golden teardrops that disappear into the folds of her blankets she is smiling slightly, for she knows that she has
made mistakes and she knows that now, yes, now, is the time to no, not correct them: for you can never undo something, but to simply do things to maybe bury them, maybe put them behind her, maybe make them better, maybe make other mistakes and make them worse. And she knows that even that will be okay, because there is always a next day, there is always a next week, there is a always a next month, a next year, a next decade. And should all that fail, maybe there is something beyond this thing that we call life, that we call existence. An afterlife, a journey up a tunnel with a light at the end, reincarnation..
The beginning is not the end and the end is not the beginning. And now she sits and she thinks. And she speaks and prays they listen, if only got a while.