Little Sparrow

I have vivid dreams where my mother is still alive. They’re so real to me that by the time I wake up, I have to re-learn that she’s gone.

Sometimes when my dad calls me from back home, I think he’s going to tell me she’s returned suddenly. That she’s come back from somewhere far away.

In my dreams, she’s just how she was on earth. Sometimes busy and not wanting to deal with my bullshit, other times soft and nostalgic.

I rented Uncle Buck last night because I missed her so much. Because it reminds me of how we used to laugh together at it. I ended up going to bed early with a bad cough settling into my lungs. The apartment was cold and my head was beginning to hurt.

That’s the hardest part about my dreams of her. Reminding myself that she’s dead and re-learning what that means. It takes up this entire space in my being, it fluctuates like a rubber band whose tensile strength is tested. The fabric of my reality forever changed.

I saw pink rose cupcakes on my Reddit timeline, tea-roses. Tea-roses always remind me of my Grammy. Tea-roses and freesia and cashmere sweaters and Nat King Cole.

I’ll probably end up brewing another cup of strong, black coffee in just a minute. Even against better judgement, I’ll end up smoking a cigarette.

There was a David Lynch painting I saw a bit ago. It featured a triangle, a fractured square with weathered fabric over it, and what looked like a bone or a human genome. I gazed at it for a good long time, not arriving at any conclusion but instead satisfied with the enigma and strangeness of it.

My heart feels like a little sparrow sometimes, in the cage of my chest. Twittering and humming and flapping its wings. Calling out for my mother in some far off land. Hoping for another dream where I can play a motion picture of us together again.