In Absence

By Lemon Sparrow

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This room smells of death. The machines have yet to be removed, and their unaccustomed silence fills the air, choking me and bringing tears to my eyes. The sheets on my mother’s bed are still rumpled, imprinted with the limp shape paramedics carried away not a week ago, and allowing myself to forget, I imagine that she is only in the bathroom, that she will come from the second door (it is red, she told me she liked the color because it reminded her of autumn, but at the moment it only brings to mind blood) and she will wrap her arms around me. They will not be thin and weak as they were during the last days of her illness, but strong and full of life.

I sigh, falling back onto my mother’s bed. The covers and most of the sheets are bunched up at the bottom - the paramedics pulled them all back, and no one has been in this room since to straighten it up. My mother took a certain joy in housework, I think, and though my father and I try, the house has taken on a certain disheveled appearance since her death. It’s something we can’t quite help, because it is evidence of her passing, another unavoidable voice telling us, telling me, that she is gone and not coming back.

She told me to keep living after her death, even requesting that we wear bright colors at her funeral. It was supposed to be a celebration of life, not a mourning of her death, she told me, but although I wore red that day, along with a pair of silver sparrow earrings she bought me for my birthday, I cried like everyone else.

I now lie where she did, inhaling sick and all the pills that were useless to her in the end. My head were hers was, my hands, my feet where hers lay for weeks, I whisper: “I miss you, Mom.”

Sometimes living is just not dying, Mom.

I inhale.

This room smells of death, and it is suffocating. I have to get out of here.

finis