Friendsterization

    I watched my mother changing for work today and I was struck at how beautiful she was. I watched as the towel draped lopsidedly over her one confused breast, wondering where the other one had gone to. I didn’t even know myself.

     Breast cancer she had told us over prayer one night, right before she broke down and gave a deep howl that was almost unhuman. As her daughter, I felt nothing. I know I prayed, but I can’t even remember what I said or who I prayed to.

     Her ordeal was a blur of words to me. Chemotherapy. Mastectomy. I didn’t understand what it all meant. I conditioned myself to feel nothing, so I understood nothing.

     Only then, when she was changing for work and I sat on the bed, mesmerized by the closed wound on her chest that something within me stirred. I wanted to run my hands over the place where the breast that I had once nursed from had been. I wanted to feel the rough scars on my fingertips so that I too would know. So that I too could understand like she understood.

    But a glass wall stood between my hand and her scar. I felt a deep sense of regret that I had not understood before. As if sensing my thoughts, she stopped combing her hair and looked at me in the mirror. She saw me as I saw me and she was full of understanding. She said nothing. She didn’t have to. All she did was smile. 

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Currently Reading:

A Million Little Pieces by James Frey