Putting on a pot to boil, I could see my breath float away from me. So desperately, I wanted my air to keep dragging out like one long rope. It never did. No matter how hard I tried, the cloud always dissipated. I don’t know why it stopped, but it breaks my heart that it did. Had my boots not peeked at me from the corner by the oven, a puddle seeping into the wood would have gone unnoticed. I believed my ex could no longer enter my thoughts unannounced. The water from the boots said otherwise. My mother’s coughing drew me out before I could wonder when it was I had learned to sleep in the middle of the bed and not the left. My mother and I had silently agreed to ration her pills, half a blue oval a day. She grew thin. I hadn’t heard her speak in days, and I knew she was leaning on me, but I had nothing to give to support the weight of us both. My lifeline left, somewhere, tucked himself back inside my mind. He kept drawing me out into rivers and ravines and lakes almost weekly now. In those weeks before she died, she would watch me walk through the front door, sopping wet. Although she never asked why, I had nothing to say even if she did. I barred myself from her, locked myself in my room. I created distance—miles that did not exist—between our bedrooms down the same hall. In there, I pretended that the jackets I hung up as adornments were real people, and sometimes if the fan spun fast enough, it would appear as though the jackets could breathe, as if they had heartbeats. Their beats could not mimic the rhythmic percussion I had become so accustomed to from naked nights of skin to skin, ear to chest. The whistle of the kettle pierced me the way it had when my professor told me I shouldn’t finish class, when she said home was where I should head. When my mother got sick, I thought one week was enough to take off, but I was never going back. They said at first it was an infection in the liver, then the kidneys. Then one day, they said she was going to die. It just was. Now, there I was crawling out of bed with my slinky body, sliding further from the truth that she was dying, and that he was never going to come back.
Syd Brewster is a Black American writer based in the Hudson Valley. Her writing has been featured in Sink Hollow, God’s Cruel Joke, and The Table Review. You can find her at sydbrewster.com and on Instagram @sydbrews
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