There's Always That...

I once left my mother in her bed, in a pool of blood, as she cried out my name, begging for me to stay. Honestly, all I saw in the fugliness of the moment, was an opening.

In the living room, I quietly called an ambulance, whispered our address and gently cradled the phone. I tip-toed, out our glass front door. As I slid it closed, the weathered aluminum frame, scrapped loudly, squealing on me, to her. The moment tumbled still. We both understood then, that I was done. That I was never coming back. I looked up from the door's handle and saw my reflection. I saw my father's eyes, his cowlick, his sloppy sad smile. Her pleading rallied, forcing me back to the moment, and I realize it's me doing the smiling. My hand reacts, placing itself flat on the cool glass door, covering up the smile’s last bit of evidence. Numb, is how everything went then. I didn't feel the door closing. I didn't hear my feet running down the street. With lungs burning, I ran further then she could ever wail. I was barely fifteen.

You see, I was the only thing she had left from the past. Her one tether. The only reason she had to breathe. I was proof that she had mattered to someone, once. The weight of it cornered me, paralyzed me, it refused to let me be. I thought often of my father, of how he had left me there. I suppose, it was his way of paying the piper. His only chance to fly.

My mother was severely handicapped at that point. I have no memories what so ever of her being well, mentally or physically. She had a couple of strokes when I was fourteen. Massive strokes. The kind that leaves one side an awkward and embarrassed stranger to the other. One even happened right in front of me, as I was visiting her at the hospital. At the time, I didn't realize how sick she was. I just needed 27 dollars for the electric bill, before it got shut off.

The stroke happened as she grabbed my wrist and slurred into my ear, "I..died last night...I saw myself from ooover derrr.." Her left eye rolled passed the window, and focused on some snowflakes that fell against it. The right eye, milky and blue, looked into me, as if to search and destroy anything that was possibly left. Her Doctor witnessed it all. He drank greedily from it, trying to remember every detail in order to have something to talk about later to his bored wife. When he caught me thinking that of him, he handled it by barking at the nurse to get me out of the room. Perhaps, he thought he was protecting me. He didn't need to protect me. In fact, I hated when people protected me, the disappointment was unbearable when they'd realize how hard it was going to be to wrestle me away from her fanatical grip. If the Doctor really wanted to help me, he should've gotten me a ride home, before all the pawn shops closed. I had slipped my grandmother's ring off my mother's swollen stroked-out hand, right before the nurse had pulled me from the room. That electric bill had to be paid one way or the other.