Journey's end

“I was going to call,” she says.

I speak a silence filled with unsaid words.

Her eyes flit about the room, taking everything and nothing in. The walls peel with the smell of chemical cleanings.

“I was going to say I love you,” she says brusquely. “But I thought, you already know that. Not much point in saying what you know, is there?”

I am dying, I think, or whisper, or say.

She pats my hand as though it were the paw of a dog. “I was going to talk about the weather, but it's not nice. All rain and chances of snow. It has to be above freezing to snow, you know. I read that somewhere.” And she laughs, the sound entirely devoid of a sob. “And here I am talking about it anyway.”

She reaches for the cigarettes in a pocket, drops her hand. “The doctors tell me you aren't in pain. They have you on drugs, so many drugs. You might not even know what I am saying.”

She looks at me, holding my gaze with hers; I see no tears, but a tenderness that confuses me.

“You never sent me letters; I almost didn't find you,” she says, soft, almost gentle. “But I did, and your eyes are so empty now, so very empty again.”

I want to ask how that can make her happy, what she could even mean, but my voice is a single breath, croaked, and she squeezes my hand and tells me she is here.

And somehow, despite everything, it seems right.

travel

I remember you, sometimes. Not as now, but when your eyes were empty, drinking in the world without conditions, watching to learn and learning to watch. That is what a mother can love, what is remembered. There was a time when you were so empty you were beautiful.

I left when you were six to return when you were sixteen. I do that to all my friends, all my family: vanish and return, to see you with new eyes. We change slowly, but we do change, and if I had stayed with you, remained with any of you, I would never have been able to see your song except to confuse it with my own.

I don't have roots, you understand: I don't want to cease changing, to be a stone ground down by the river. And I want to see you change, how you grow and become someone new, each time I visit. I can remember each you that was, and each you that is, and when I try I can love them all.


I wonder if our eyes become empty again when we die?
I would love this to be true, but love has no place in truth.

You prove that to me with your tears, and all those letters you never write. If you really missed me, you'd find a way to find me, I said, gently, and you said you were going to travel too, as if you could hurt me with words. I remember your colic-crying; nothing you say can hurt worse, and I told you that you won't find anything that you can't find here as well.

I should have told you that we only travel to lose ourselves. I should have asked you if you ever thought I had changed as well. I wonder how empty my eyes are.