MOM, DEAREST

 The love of a mother.

Like a candle lit with breath instead of fire—Delicate, flickering, but still warm enough to ward off night.

When it’s there, it wraps around the bones like linen soaked in rose oil. Gentle, but binding.

It softens the corners of a world built from stone and long days.

A mother’s love. 

An invisible architecture. You don’t see it until the roof caves in.

I remember static screams more than I remember lullabies.

I remember watching her mouth move like a prayer I wasn’t meant to hear.

She smelled of iron walls and too much restraint.

And when she held me, it felt like standing beneath a sky that might rain, but never wetting. Sheilding me from puddles of rot.

For some, a mother’s love is a garden. Tended, watered, blooming year after year.

For others, it is the memory of a seed that never broke soil.

I grew up making maps out of her absence. Never center focus.

Learning to read between the pauses, and attempts at interpreting sighs like scripture.

She taught me things without meaning to.

How to swallow shame. How to smile at doors that never opened. But still, I wanted to believe in her.

In the idea of her. That somewhere beneath the weight she carried was a woman who once dreamed of being soft.

The love of a mother.

It can be a myth told in half-ligh, passed down like a relic wrapped in torn silk. 

And whether it was there or not, whether it cradled you or cracked you, you carry its shape in the way you reach for others. You become what you longed for. And in that way, you write her story from your own hands.