While the bed is still warm

MEMORIES

This year has been a year of reminiscing and reverence. A sweet ode to the one who left us at the end in January. And though, scientifically speaking, the biology of a wound states that in eight months the wound heals, skin scars and tissue is replaced, it is as if there was nothing there, anyway.

But, somehow, it feels like there’s a book of memories held by a spine but now there’s a tear that traverses across all the pages like a pencil stabbed in its cover and now the past, present and the foreseeable future are only rended by this tragic absence. Like an emptiness or a shadow of deepening sorrow, it has brought forward memories and tainted the current days.

The way she used to fold laundry, how the house always smelt a certain way, how she put kalonji in everything she cooked, how she made sauces always stacked in the fridge, how she always put others before her, the way she was so particular about everything, how she was the house that was our home and without her it will never feel the same.

How once someone wakes up and gets out of bed, but you can tell that they were there all night by the warmth that is left in the bedsheets, it feels like there’s warmth too escaping through the bleeding wounds. Because healing is messy, and memory is a strange thing. With time it feels as if I’m looking for ways to keep her alive in my memory. How she translated herself in the language she gave my mother; running through her palms like heart lines. And now like a twinge, as I put my laundry away I notice it smells the same as hers. I look for the same taste in the meals I make, and as evening sets in I crave that feeling of peace beyond words. To pay homage to a life of service and careful, meticulous love.

And like ghosts of the past that become sublime and fill the sterile rooms. Their words echo, ‘what’s left for us to come back.’ And I brood diligently over these remarks. What is it that makes my heart keep coming back to the same memories that shaped me. Why am I always trying to create the best days of when I was a child? Why can’t I submerge in the growing nuisances of adulthood, take life by the collar and accept the pain, hurt and the blood. I guess that’s what sets me apart. The need to indulge in the place where the heart keeps dwelling. For I shall stay here. In the sweet scent of a fond memory, while the bed is still warm and the storm hasn’t arrived.