|
Woman
There is much time to think, and much time to remember, and much time to reconstruct the lives of the dead. We race though eons and galaxies, God and I, watching His creations and existing for each other, and in the quiet moments I think of Earth. There was a woman. This woman was not a miracle, she was not a saint — she was only a woman who lived and died. She began her life with everything: good home, good family, good prospects. It was all there for her taking, and through study and effort she could have built herself a place in the world, a place that would have been solid and safe and good. She could have been a quiet woman living a simple kind of life. But she became everything that she was not supposed to be. She threw away safety, family, and future for the one thing she did not have: love. She loved the boy. She loved him with young love — unlearned and unpracticed — but she did always love him. Although he had nothing and could offer her nothing, she loved him. She saw a future of second-hand shirts and conversations to the soft light of the sunrise, and she loved him. She saw his poet's heart and his philosopher's mind, and she loved him, and she gave up everything she could have been. No one understood but herself — but then, no one ever does. Only she could see the love in his brooding gazes and the depth to his black jeans. Only she believed in his poems and his music. Only she trusted always and forever in the power of love. Others thought him unworthy of her, but she knew he was a gift from a soft and beautiful heaven, and he loved her too. When she became pregnant, they escaped together. The small apartment in London was more than they could afford, but they loved each other too much to care. The child was born, and they named him after the hunter of the skies, and the family lived on bread and water and romance. Time moves quickly in pleasure, and years of motherhood flew by, and the child was four years old. And then the world fell apart. Existence in that tiny apartment deep within London was so fragile, and no one had known until it collapsed. One night the husband did not come home. One night the phone call came. One night changed it all because on that one night, she learned that her dear, her husband, that boy she had loved, was dead. Dead, and cold already, deep in a back alleyway. The world stood still in that apartment, and crumpled, and ended. And then she hung up the phone. The fight from destruction, though recovery, to life again, was painful. It hurt the child and it hurt the mother; but the human body and soul can heal. Tears flowed in that home like a river, and then a stream, and then only a trickle on barren land. She worked two jobs, and then only one, and then she owned her own restaurant. The terror was over and the family was whole again. A mother, a ghost, and a thirteen year old son. The woman thought her son something special — and he was. He had his father's eyes, and he saw the world as few could. He had his mother's mind, and he knew how be strong and cleaver. He was his own as well, a child of love and London, a creature of sensation, a being of loveliness. Her son was something special, and now he is all that remains of her life and her legacy. How was it when she died? Were there flames and pain? Did she fall to pieces from within? Or did she simply collapse with the buildings? What did she think in those last moments? Did she remember her true and only love — did she whisper the name of her son? He did not hear her. Her restaurant has crumbled. Her apartment is gone, the Ikea dishware melted, the messy beds less even than dust. All that she was, even her bones, have smoldered and burned and disappeared. The trail that once marked her struggle to survive stands no more and all that she lived and loved for is no more than the ash of a flame. Her son is all that remains, and even he is no longer the same. He has changed, and he is no longer her child of wonder. The father's poems, written on tired worn paper read a thousand times, are gone. His love letters are gone. His grave is gone. Only his son remains. That god's child named for the hunter of the heavens, that child of love, that product of toil, that special growing beauty is all that is left and it was he who destroyed it all. She worked so hard to raise him, and she adored him, and she loved him so, and it was he who sold the world. The irony falls like bell sounds on deaf ears. I am that son, and that woman was my mother, and she rests now in my thoughts as only a memory and a message, fading as the years pass by. God's will has been done, and I am His, and His alone, and His forever, and the world is gone. What a woman she was. |