It’s my mum’s anniversary in a week and I can’t stop dreaming about her.
I’ve written about this before – how my dreams are always the same: I realize that she hasn’t died, but I know that she is, in fact dying, and I am consumed with a frantic panic, a feverish need to tell her how much I love her.
Mama, I love you.
Mama, I won’t leave you.
Mama, just hang on.
I’m here.
I sometimes think – it’s been seven years. When do I get to start dreaming something new?
Tonight, at dinner, “Of Monsters and Men” came on. I usually ask Marc to skip through their songs because they’re too raw a reminder of the trip I took with her in 2016, when we adventured across the north of Europe. Every night, after we had talked and laughed ourselves into easy, exhausted silence, she would tuck herself into her twin bed, just a foot from my own, and fall asleep.
I would stay up later, writing about our day.
Her soft, rhythmic breathing a gentle juxtaposition to the frenetic pace of my fingers, flying across the keyboard.
Every night I’d write to “My Head is an Animal”.
Every night, I’d write a part of our story to life.
The story that was – and will always be – my mother and me.
Sharing information about the town we’d biked through, it’s history, beauty. The secrets we shared. The wine we’d drank. The indescribable moment of witnessing a forever dusk and the evenings that left us sun-stained and aglow.
The love that I felt for her in those moments – next to her – felt like it would swallow me whole. It was a love so big it hurt, and I swear when I hear “Dirty Paws” I am back there, in that bed.
And I can feel my heart breaking and mending, breaking and mending, over and over again, like a two-piece jigsaw puzzle, so fragile in my clumsy hands.
The night before I left Halifax, after she finished her chemotherapy, I wrote her a card. On the front it said “Fuck Cancer”. In it, I wrote about my big love. About the importance of our story. About our trip and my fears and my need for her to know – mama, to know, I’m here.
After she died, I found that card behind her bedside table – the envelope only half opened. She had likely been distracted and forgotten about it in the moment, and it had fallen out of sight.
She never read it.
I hardly slept that night, terrified that she didn’t know all of those things I had written to her.
Mama.
I don’t think this anymore. I know that you knew my big love – that you felt it in your bones.
How you knew each and every story of us – maybe written by me. Always written in the stars.
So tonight, I’ll send a whisper up to you – that maybe this year I’ll dream something big.
I’ll dream something new.
Rant and Roll 