June 15, 2008
(Woohoo! Janvi says I should post this, and I have finally gotten around to it because I am ::cough:: totally doing homework. Yay. [Edit: 100th post finally, yay?])
She met him first on a Monday night in March. He had only glanced at her for a moment that night, but she had seen the world reflected in his ocean-deep eyes.
It was love at first sight.
He instantly became everything she lived for. There were afternoons spent with his head cradled in her arms as he slept. She would leave butterfly kisses upon his doll-like eyelids and listen to the metronomic rhythm of his breathing, of his heartbeat. And there were times she would stay awake all night because he had needed her. And on those nights, she knew she needed him even more.
But he wasn’t perfect. She knew that, too.
Because there were times as time went on when she would scream at him in utter exasperation. But at the same time, she would wonder whether she was to blame for the way he acted. Perhaps it was her fault, always her fault.
After all, she wasn’t perfect either.
And there was a time when he grew distant. A time when she knew there were other girls in his life. She knew it wasn’t her place to be jealous. It was his life. He had to move on someday.
She just wished someday hadn’t come so soon.
But he had come back to her. She didn’t remember how long it was until then for it seemed like longer than she could ever put into words. But he had come back, and it was all that mattered.
And she had accepted him. How could she not? She embraced him with arms that had never been quite as widely open for anyone else. She embraced him with even more love than she had years earlier. He reassured her that she had not lost him. She would not lose him. He would be there for her just as she had for him.
He had left five years earlier.
She sits in the same room she had first met him in forty years ago. He was my first, she says, cradling a fading photograph in her hands. My only.
There is another photograph in the room. It is turned face down on the uncomfortably sterile table by her side.
It is him.
He is grinning confidently into the camera as he stands before a well-known flag of red, white, and blue, representing the same confidence he has. It was taken two years before he left.
He could never return to her now. She would be the one who would have to return to him. Tell him we’ll be seeing each other soon, she whispers, a shadow of a smile tugs at the frayed edges of her aged lips.
It is the third of March, and the dying sun is casting its long golden fingers upon the immaculate tiles of the hospital floor. He would have been exactly forty that night. She knows. She has been counting. She doesn’t even remember her own age. She had stopped counting the day he left.
She is a mother.
And he is her son.