Anything hurts less than the quiet. Sleeping on rotting oil bridges with small blades jarred between your numbed jaws, toasting the screams of your father across drunken oceans, stripping down to your skin and bones in the midst of lightning showers. Soon we all become a series of things that hurt less than the inevitable. It's easy to feel alone in the life we create out of our parents’ dreams; dreams always scattered, broken, half-felt, and constant. Home has never felt so far, driving our minds off cliffs and into stagnancy, picking our heads up to look into the eyes of wicked fires fostered from the repeated calling of a younger self. Yearning to never grow into the person you’ve become. And maybe you were trying to hide it from yourself before, but you can’t anymore. So, when the world stops spinning, your father’s tears quiet him to sleep, lightning slips into a lightless rain, and the sea sobers up upon your mother’s shore. Maybe you’ll realize that life shouldn’t be this hard and that maybe if, for once, you just breathe, you can get through this part.
--
Whiffs of car engines spill through the cracked window, it’s taste silking into the wind. The reflection in his rearview mirror looks just like your mother, her half-moon eyes, always half-filled with faint resemblances of an idea that came before. You touch her face, your skin, her fingers pushing deeply into your cheeks.
“Ma?” your voice comes out in a hesitant whisper, making the name lose intention, as the car engine-wind inhales shakily and puffs ‘Ma’ out into a decimated atmosphere
“You, alright there? Been quiet since we started driving.” He's asking out of obligation, but he likes the quiet, it gives him space to dream of her, to replace your figure with her own.
“I’m fine, tired I guess, but okay. It’s been a long day, a long year” And everything you say feels so incomplete now, especially when speaking to him, like the words keep trying to pull meaning out of your lungs but its all just phrases and exhaust combined into a subtle fury, a funny sort of sound. The type of sorrow sadness wails between the gaps of silence that have now capsized your mind.
“Yeah, I know kiddo, but we’re almost home. Home, feels funny now, doesn’t it? Home, home.” Watch as his eyes begin to run into the oasis of time, his mind spanning like a horizon until jutting down into an abyss of regression.
Come Back. Come Back. Come Back.
“Why don't we go for a little drive? Just you and me, we’ll take a trip down the coast, to that little nook between the mountains. That one beach your mother and I used to always bring you to when you were young?” You can feel his eyes climbing back up the abyss to feel you. You want to say no. But you don't, because it can't be you, the final person to deny a dead wife’s husband the final taste of what it was to once be whole. And sure, you were the daughter, the split child reckoned by a mother’s mourning psalm, but before there was you, made by two, there was just them and now it’s only him, there was nothing you could ever do and you wouldn’t deny him the right to your mother’s spirit.
“You sure you want to go that far, Papa?”
“Homes a lot further than the beach, than the mountains, and the sea. It could take your mother’s lifetime to find home again. But the beach, the mountains, the past, that’s just a couple miles down south.”
—
You always forget that this kind of Earth still exists. One where the stars blink endlessly through deserted nights and oceans can be found roaring against a snoring mountain, the peak dancing somewhere along the moon’s birthplace.
Your mother sleeps at it’s tip and fishes in her daughter’s mind, she’s searching for the baby girl once cradled, now shrinking like miniature cyclones erupting in upon itself and bursting into short gasps.
Breathe baby, breathe
The kind of Earth where feeling small meant you were among great, fantastic, wild things that let you climb on their backs and ride across fields of dreams.
You watch the reflection of the girl who looks like your mother race passed this Earth from the car window. Her eyes gazing into the beginning of time, you look so much like your mother, but you are not her.
He watches too, but with recognition. He knows this Earth like the brown on his skin, spends his nights dreaming of it. This Earth is one where time rests and the past and present and future all merge into this giant ocean engulfed with simple moments. He comes to swim through the current every now and then, the salt tasting reminiscent of Ma during her best days.
—
Nothing is like you remember. The way the mountains curved their backs into deep tunnels for you and Ma to scream through or the way the sand, placid against your skin, would protect you from shattered beer bottles and tokens from another childhood, reminding you that this space could never be owned.
You leave Papa as he walks slowly towards the ancestors’ rock right above shore. You had planned on hating this place, on looking out into the sea and polluting it with your rage. Destroying the world this place had built for you, Ma, and Papa. A world you had always imagined to be so fragile, had survived when Ma couldn’t. And you had promised you wouldn’t cry. But looking out into the world you thought would disappear as Ma began to, you take a deep breath, tears softly welling.
“She's still here, you know. I feel her, all around us, constantly crafting the mountains and the sea, the nooks and your face, so that we know this isn’t the end.”
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