It wasn’t like this yesterday. I hear trucks outside and no child startles or runs for cover in me. This truck passes and the living room is still again. The puzzle pieces are impossibly lifeless. There is a vacuum where yesterday was begging for Caillou; there is no desperation pulling on the corners of my pajamas for “up, UP!” Everything is still half alive from breakfast, chairs askew, cups half empty, crumbs and milk splattered under the table. It wasn’t like this yesterday.
It’s Autumn, officially. I can tell because she whispers through the wall’s cracks and kisses my nose and fingertips. I go upstairs to get socks, for the first time in a season. I feel unknown and new in this familiar place. The air feels like apple picking and smells of chalk and pencil lead (or maybe that’s just my mind making sense with what I used to know). I make tea uninterrupted. I sit here until the kettle moves me. It wasn’t like this yesterday.
This is what I asked for, but I no longer understand calm, so I watch his last recording.
Everything is moving and hot. All around the kitchen cockadoodle doodle doo.
His hair swirls around his crown, sticky sweat around his ears. He sits, rocking from his core, bottom firmly on the carpet. The rest of him is a childish gyration. The late afternoon sun pounds through the white cotton curtains. The black fan on the white table doggedly pushes the same air in a circle. Everything is alive, in motion. Even the dust in the air takes up space and dances.
Make your arms into trees, now wave them in the breeze. He does, grinning, and glances back at me for approval. I hear my laughter, but it sounds like a mother’s laughter, not my own. Nostalgia comes, already.
It wasn’t like this yesterday.
~~~
I wrote this post in for Heather of the Extraordinary-Ordinary‘s Just Write prompt. Please head over there and see who else participated!
Breathtakingly gorgeous.
you are! thank you tracy. your words are pretty dang well wrought, themselves.
Oh Kate. This is just lovely. As are you.
<3
thank you!
OH. I loved this. So much.
And this sentence… "Everything is still half alive from breakfast, chairs askew, cups half empty, crumbs and milk splattered under the table."
Genius.
-Ellie
I find it's not that way after dinner. After dinner everything is just tired. but after breakfast, even the spills are talking.
goosebumps! This was awesome. I love how you juxtaposed the empty of today with the full of yesterday in vivid imagery!…and images that any mother could recognize! I love it.
thank you Jamie!
This is great. Mysterious in some ways. Familiar in some ways too though.
I really think that our lives as parents are interconnected. we can feel all the daily similarities that come with children.
I love every word of this and did not want the musings to end with the last sentence. You have a great talent with words infused with emotion.
Alita
Thank you alita. You do as well.
"It wasn’t like this yesterday."
I loved that ending. Solid.
I LOVED this. I just wanted to keep reading more and more. I could have read "it wasn't like this yesterday" a 100 more times. =)
How is this? That we get exactly what we want…only to find it's not nearly what we thought it would be?
Or that 'exactly what we want' takes a little time to be lived in, too!
Wow. I had goosebumps reading this.
"It wasn’t like this yesterday."
So so true.
I always forget change until it is upon me. and then i'm just sometimes completely…frozen by it.
This is amazing xx
you are! glad you are back!
Serious talent friend, this was gorgeous.
thank you amber.
I LOVED this. Thank you so much for doing Just Write. You need to do it again, you're very good at it.
xo
heather, you inspire.
beautifully done. I was right there with you!
and i was right with you, today.
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