A Moment

An overly detailed description of a moment.

She was lying in a rustic bed, wrapped up in covers.  I sat a few feet away from the end of it on a hard stool.  It was slightly uncomfortable, but that woman had birthed me naturally, so sitting there was, by no means, a sacrifice.  She smiled.  She laughed.  She wrapped herself up a little tighter.  The fresh air coming in made it feel like spring, and maybe there, it was.  If I had placed my bare feet down, maybe I would have felt the cold, hardwood floor beneath me, absorbing my heat while supporting my weight with little to no effort. 

 

Everything was clear, but nothing was permanent.  I watched that smile and wanted to keep it going.  I told her about the clear, blue seas of Europe.  You can see right through the water, just like you can in Jamaica.  I told her about a guy that could make me laugh.  The good ones are always just out of reach.  I told her about how I kept reading the classics.  I loved classical novels.  They took me to a different time; to a place I could fantasize about, and read about, that revolved around romance.  It was not just a different era; it was a different way of looking at things that attracted me to those fictions.

 

She talked to me about things I had never heard about, part of me wondering if we were in a Shakespeare play.  Sometimes, during her tales, I would wait for applause, but it never came.  She described things more beautiful than a butterfly, things that were sweeter than honey and more endless than the Texas sky.  She talked of things that were deeper than the universe, but she did all this with such ease, as if she were talking about her grandkids on a Sunday afternoon.  I knew that she was talking and I could almost visualize every word, but I could not hear her speaking.  All I heard was her laugh, or maybe, that was all I cared to hear. 

 

The room was unnaturally light, but the light did not come from something man-made.  The colors of the blankets, of the stool, of her hair, of her fingernail polish�"they were all colors that looked like they had been pre-determined on the palette of a watercolor artist.  Everything held a slight glow within itself that blended with the objects around it.  The colors and the light were not from outside sources, they were from within each object.  Of everything I had seen in this world, nothing seemed as peaceful as that moment.

 

She rolled around a little bit, like a little child trying not to wake up, but not being able to avoid it.  She stretched out, revealing her feet on the other side of the blankets.  She propped them up on the bedpost, near me.  I reached out to them, brushing them slightly to tickle her, but when I looked up, she had already tucked them away, probably having predicted what I was in the process of doing. 

 

I looked down at my hands for a moment.  They were suddenly becoming too real for comfort.  I looked back up at her.  “Mama?” I asked.  “Do you think that maybe someday, I’ll be ok again?”

 

And just like that, everything was gone.  I was lying in my own bed, and everything from that moment, in that one instant, had just disappeared.