“She held in her hands for one brief moment the globe which we spend our lives in trying to shape, round, whole, and entire from the confusion of chaos.” ― Virginia Woolf
Nathan looked at Whitney as she motioned him towards the direction of the woman, “Go, it’s okay.” He slowly approached the woman. As he advanced his apprehension grew until he stopped in complete recognition of the woman. His brown eyes immediately were washed by his flooding tears. He turned away and looked at Whitney whose loving expression consoled him.
“Hello Nathan,” Nathan bit the side of his inner lower cheek with his teeth. He refused to look at the woman. “I tell you every day that I love you.”
Anger rose in the child. He found the courage to stare at this image of his mother as he spoke defiantly, “Well, I don’t hear you.”
“I know, but I speak to you all the time.”
“How could you leave me?”
“I never left you,” she responded calmly.
“Never left me? One day I woke up and you were gone. You left me and Dad all alone.”
“I understand how hard this is Nathan, but that person who left you wasn’t me.”
“That’s what Dad always says,” he responded in disgust.
“She had to leave in order that I could remain.” There was no way for the meaning of these words to be fully understood by a child, but Nathan comprehended for the first time something implicit. It wasn’t the words that reassured him as much as the feeling that was produced. This recognition had visited him often when he was alone sitting in his yard. In the stillness he may have heard a distant bird calling or the attempt of the wind to speak to him as it passed through the branches of thick leaves. Sometimes the concert of breaking waves on a silent shore translated a similar message always imperceptible yet calling, calling to him.
He looked at his mother. Her light brown hair had the natural curls that he remembered reaching for as a toddler. The same curls that tickled him when his mother playfully blew on his soft belly as an infant. Her eyes had changed too. The beautiful juniper eyes that he had often stared into had returned. As he looked into these eyes the memory of the evenings when his father had to work late stole away his present vision. During those nights his mother’s eyes grew angry. They no longer spoke lovingly to him, instead they pierced him wounding his spirit leaving scars of discontent. On these evenings she slurred obscenities and it was not uncommon for her to belt her son with the back of her hand blaming him for her misery. Those evenings were more haunting than anything Nathan had confronted even in this strange land. She threatened him so that he would conceal this torment and in so doing she planted the origin of Nathan’s resentment, a poisonous seed in the naked soil. Resentment grew each time Nathan was compelled to witness his mother’s rage, a discontent that few people other than his father recognized.
This memory furled between mother and child now as if they were watching a show together. “I was very weak Nathan. I turned to something that promised me that it would make me feel good.”
Nathan looked away, the pain on his face however was visible, “Why couldn’t I make you feel that way?”
“That power my son, was so strong. It had such a grip on me. It’s ability to make me believe in its strength erased any other charm. Even the beauty of my relationship with you.”
“But how could you leave Mom?”
“Because my love for you was stronger than its grip.”
Nathan shook his head refusing to accept the explanation, “That doesn’t make sense.”
“I can’t imagine that it would. As much as that feeling pulled me away from you and others something stronger kept me aware of how important you are to me. It was as if I was being swept away by a tornado while refusing to let go of you.”
“Then why didn’t you hang on?” he sadly responded.
“Because I realized that I was pulling you in with me.”
“So you left.”
“Well that thing I had become left, yes.”
“All alone.”
“I didn’t leave you alone. I left you with the ability to remember me the way you loved me.”
Understandably this was all too much for Nathan to comprehend.
“What happened when you left.”
“That doesn’t matter. On that day I no longer existed.” A long stillness permeated over the scene as both child and mother allowed their words to settle around them like a heavy dew. “Here we are. Please don’t let me go. I know it is hard to understand, but I never left you in that way. You are then truly alone.”
“I bet you can’t come with me to find Kyle can you?”
“Not in the way you want me to.”
“Okay.”
“But. I’m with you.” Nathan turned away as if to leave.
“Nathan.”
“What?”
“Can I have a hug?”
The boy surrendered and rushed to his mother’s open arms. They embraced under the beaming sun for that moment, a moment that lasted far longer than time could account for. “Please revisit this memory over and over when you grow older. My love for you will never be broken despite how anger will try to misshape it.” Her comment seemed to drift away carried off by the wind until all Nathan could hear was the rustling leaves from the trees that surrounded him. Nathan opened his eyes. He wasn’t stunned that his mother was gone. His eye lashes were damp as they often were on evenings when he laid restlessly in the solitude of his bed.