Old age, on tip toe, lays her jeweled hand
Lightly in mine.-Come, tread a stately measure
Most gracious partner, nobly posed and bland.
Ours be no boisterous pleasure,
But smiling conversation, with quick glance
And memories dancing lightlier than we dance,
“Don’t worry Ma.” I plead in my most reassuring voice. I receive her hand in mine and grasp it gently. Her rough skin meshes against my smooth fingertips. I run my fingers along hers, rubbing her knuckles and glossing over the scars.
“Fifteen years,” she says as I apply more pressure to her hands. “I gave them fifteen years of my life—“she starts sobbing. “All of those years of working, I gave them my blood, my sweat, and my tears.” She drops her head down in embarrassment and tries to cover her face. She doesn’t realize how beautiful she is at this moment. Her face, now shielded by her hair is wrinkled from the tears streaming down her cheek. Her make up smeared down her eyes, and the look on her face was bleak, dismal. She is beautiful; the type of beauty that extends past social conditioning and objectified attraction. I hate how we conceive beauty in our society. We think of it as an intrinsic quality but it’s not. It’s a form, a medium of expressiveness. The sensation of beauty is pleasure in affection, and I’ll be damned if anyone tried to tell me she wasn’t beautiful.
“Ma—“I reach out and pull her head into my chest. We’ll get through this, we’ll move on.” I try to comfort her but she continues to cry.
“I just don’t know what to do Bryant.” She says, lifting her head up and drying her eyes on my jacket. “What do I do?”
“You have to endure Ma. You feel pain, yeah but you’ll survive. We’ll survive.” My voice cracks at survive and I can feel the tears building up in my eyes but I try to remain strong, for her sake. “It sucks, I know. But you have to look on the bright side. You hated that place. I hated that you worked there. You don’t need to be working that hard every day Ma. I can’t stand seeing you like this. You deserve so much better and I wish that I could just take care of you.” The water accumulating in my eyes starts to weigh down on me and the tears begin to stream down my cheek. “You can go back to school again. You were doing so well last year and you are so close to getting your degree.”
She paused in contemplation. “I just don’t know baby, I just…” I feel her looking into my eyes and for the first time in my life, I realize the mortality of the woman I had always believed to be immortalized.
“Nobody knows Ma, life is so unpredictable. It can be sudden yet volatile, incessant yet decaying. It’s a bitter mix of simplicity and complexity, but you have to keep going. You have to Ma. You just have to. I know it’s hard, I understand how hard it is. It tears at you and pushes you towards retreat but you have to salvage what you can and keep moving forward.”
“I can’t Bryant. I just can’t. You make it sound so easy. But I’ve been doing this my whole life. I’ve been beating my body up. I’ve struggled so much and I just can’t take it anymore. There is no end. I work and work and work and keep working and it just doesn’t end. It just isn’t fair B. It isn’t fair for me to have spent fifteen years working at this plant and then one day they just tell us we’re out of a job. Where is the justice in that? And they act as if they’re sorry for us. They don’t care. They don’t know what it’s like, the daily grind. The stress is constantly eating at me and I can’t take it anymore. Really devastating, that after 15 years of working my tail off to be told by June I won’t have a job. It’s hard to start over. I know God will not put more on me than I can bear. But he’s pushing it.” I don’t have a response for her. How could I?
I want to tell her that it’s not God, that there was a reason for everything and that she’d find a reason in this. But I can’t. I can’t because I don’t know how. I wouldn’t in a million years call myself an atheist; I’m not even skeptic really. I believe in a greater force, I really do. I just realize that it’s not some mystical being named God, watching us from his paradise in the clouds. I think it’s something unimaginable for the human consciousness, that the spirit world exists and that our religions and beliefs are just interpretations manifested from us trying to understand it.
I don’t think that everything just exists; it’s too perfect for that. There’s no other way to explain why we exist besides some embodiment of the spiritual world as a literal truth, and that’s all religion is to most people, but to me? To me it’s an idiom. A native one, of this moral life which may have its imperfections, sure but it’s a hard thing to just abandon. I mean, I gave up on the church a while ago. I guess that school is mostly to blame for that. It’s hard to take theology classes on religious discourse and then walk into a church and listen to the pastor read to you from a book you’re also studying as literature. The whole time you know that everything in that book has been handpicked, canonized by a synodical group of men with the sole purpose of attempting to regulate their views over society.
I’d always liked the idea of churches. People coming together, as a community and helping each other, it seemed legitimate as a child. But now I understand the big picture. Religion, at its core value isn’t about prayer, or piety and it isn’t about devoutness or grace. It gives us the encouragement to live in our imagination. We both just sit there in silence.
Arched over by a laughing heaven,
Intangible and never to be scaled.
If we confess our sins, they are forgiven.
We triumph, if we know we failed.
“I just feel like a failure.” She breaks the silence and I look at her in anguish. “I just wish that I could provide more for you and your brother and sister, I’m so sorry Bry—“
I stop her right there “What?” I ask in a tone of voice I’d never spoken to her in before. “You gave me life. What more could I possible ask from you then that? You gave me shelter, and food, and love and support. You nursed me when I was ill, nourished me when I was hungry, and nurtured me into being the man I am today. I owe everything I am to you. You raised three brilliant, beautiful and bright children. Don’t you ever, for as long as you live apologize for that.” She begins to cry again and I accompany her. It’s quiet, but the quiet is nice. We both sit there for a while, reflecting I think.
She looks up at me with her tearful eyes and now I can’t help but feel anything but sorrow. It torments me to see her suffering. She is the strongest woman I know. All of my life she’s been a beacon of tenacity and stability. I’ve always admired that about her. She’s been so powerful and anchored and to see her now, vulnerable and exhausted, it worries me. What am I going to do without her? It’s such a scary thought that just typing it makes me cringe. I always want to believe that I’ll be able to come to her at any time for help, that I’ve never stopped to think about what happens when she’s not there anymore.
It makes me think about my life, and I start to contemplate my own mortality. I think about death a lot. I’m not afraid of dying, although death is generally precipitated as a painful act, I’ve always thought of it as a simple loss of consciousness, no more to be feared than falling asleep. But I’ve always been afraid of a death without consolation. I just want to do so much in my life. I wish there was more time. That seems to be our problem. We’re always so concerned with the potentiality of our lives that we just skip through the present.
“I’m so proud of the man you’ve become.” She says, breaking the silence. I shrug it off at first but she continues. “I’m serious B, look at you. You’re so insightful and expressive in your ideals and thoughts. You’ve always been that way. You challenge yourself, and that’s what I love about you. You never accept the status quo without understanding and assessing other possibilities.” This is one of those moments in which I’m glad I have such dark skin, because I know that I would be blushing if otherwise. “Just promise me Bryant that no matter what happens you’ll never change that quality about yourself.” I nod my head in compliance and more tears begin to stream down my eyes.
Tears that in youth you shed,
Congealed to pearls, now deck your silvery hair;
Sighs breathed for loves long dead
Frosted the glittering atoms of the air
I sigh as I instinctively glance at my watch. It’s already five and I have to be at class at five thirty. She notices me checking the time and stands up out of her chair. “I’m sorry to keep you Bryant; I know you have to go to class soon.” She wipes the remaining tears from her eyes and holds her hand out to me. “Come here baby.” I stand up out of my seat to meet her with a hug and hold the embrace. Almost intuitively, we begin to dance. There’s no music, and it’s completely unprecedented. But we both start slowly gliding around the room performing a graceful minuet.
It’s at this moment that I forget about school and work. I forget about life and death, and religion and science. The only thing that I know, the only think that makes sense to me is the love I have for this woman. No one can ever match that. “Alright.” She says, picking up her purse and walking towards the door. “I’ll give you a ride to class.” And just like that she’s back. It’s as if she’s already gotten over the entire conversation we just had. It’s from this that I know that I’ll be okay. I know that I’m strong enough to endure anything, because I get it from her.
“Thank you Ma,” I say grabbing my book back from the floor. “I love you.”
“No, thank you baby” she opens the door to walk outside. “But I love you most. Now come on, I can’t have you being late for school.” I smile and follow her out the door, knowing that I’m already late, but it doesn’t matter. I know that I’ll never forget this day; I’ll never forget the dance.
Wearies or wanes, will come a calmer trance.
Lulled by the poppied fragrance of this bower,
We’ll cheat the lapsing hour,
And close our eyes, still smiling, on the dance.