It was a rainy day. This rainy-day gloom transformed my reality into an uncomfortably illusive and inescapable dream-like state. This type of dream has swallowed my reality. This dream has shaken me awake during the night. This dream is a nightmare.
I believe rain fell that particular day because God was crying too. Cloudiness devoured clear skies. And maybe this cloudiness illustrated the physical portrayal of the universe that I had now better understood, but maybe it more accurately described the intense lack of clarity that darkened my own mind. I couldn’t comprehend how this started. I had no control of what was happening. And the future wasn't years from now anymore. The future was tomorrow. The future is hoping, praying, crying for tomorrow.
My life suddenly, the world suddenly… became cloudy.
On this particular rainy day, we stopped for smoothies. This, in itself, was odd. Before, we would have gone for “two black coffees please,” and she had always said she’d rather eat her calories than drink them. But she no longer liked the taste of coffee, and she found that greens sometimes went down easier this way than with a fork on a plate.
As I sipped green sludge up my straw, I became so incredibly envious of a time when none of us felt so blue. But, again, this particular day was grey—falling perfectly in between the black and the white, the dark and the light. It was a day no worse than the rest which surrounded it, but it was a million miles from the sunny memories of June and July when we saw nothing but light in our present and our future.
She sat behind the steering wheel, holding it tightly with both hands. Her grip on the wheel and her eyes on the road were two of the only things she had control of during this time. I sat passenger-side, looking out the window ignoring the silence between us because the thoughts were so deafening inside my head. Plastic bags tossed around in the trunk. It was a regular trip to the grocery store, or better stated, it was our new regular trip. I say “new regular” because never before had I turned to my mother after a trip to Target to see tears streaming down her face. These tears were not wiped away. They were not ignored, by her or me. This was normal. This is our new normal.
In this moment, one of her hands fell from the steering wheel to hold my own. Tears blurred her vision. She was no longer in control. We sat in silence, but her prayers were so loud I could feel them. This was our new normal, and God's tears poured onto the windshield as He cried with us. Hug your mama tonight, tomorrow, & for the rest of your life.
I've been staying up late shouting my prayers in silence. He hears me.
What keeps you up at night?
Kommentare