And she cannot look at me for long. She cried four times. Not for us.
Because the hallway had been painted grey, because she had a cold, because she missed a long dead pet.
Because I would not look away?
She does not know how to say that she cares.
My mother, she cannot look at me.
Her face brightened when she told me I resemble my sister with my hair cut short.
She sent an email, she talked about her holidays,
she doesn’t care to hear more than the highlights of my time away.
Though I have plucked out every thorn from the thicket of misery that swaddled me
alone.
Salted wounds through storms of a former self I had to learn not to loathe
so I might find love and contentment.
Still, my mother cannot look at me.
And in the cafe where there is no t.v. a mobile phone screen will have to suffice.
Two decades of suffering and vice and here I am waiting for a moment where she will take me by the hand
see my iris swell and say ‘how are you love, is everything ok?’.
I will be kept waiting.
In a queue to buy an apple an hour after goodbyes, I feel the familiar crack in my chest and I spiral into a black hole. My breath doesn’t believe me that there is air in this basement and I have the feeling that I am buried in bricks.
That I am walled in the grey hallway. A miserable inconvenience, a frustrating mistake. A dead space, something to get past.
Then though, I might at least be something to cry about.
Sionnachaí 