“THE CHILD WHO IS NOT EMBRACED BY THE VILLAGE WILL BURN IT DOWN TO FEEL ITS WARMTH.”
In the space between two worlds…
A caricature of a girl holding hands with her mother lies dormant on the sunlit sand of their very own summerland. The little artist in question, still completely dry, has run off to collect seashells on the shoreline for her mother of the real world, who watches on as she soaks her feet up to her ankles. How long will it take for this simulacrum of stillness to shatter? She feels her own eyes glaze over as she is stuck there, remembering, remembering she is alive.
At first, when the girl showed her mother what she had created with a stick, she said it resembled one of those matryoshka dolls they had back at home. This was not what the drawing was supposed to resemble, but the little girl laughed anyway (“Close enough!”). She could imagine it as spontaneously as one might imagine shapes through clouds, that perhaps the mother-daughter pair had been like that at some point; perfectly stacked inside one another.
Roused from the center of the heart, laughter spills from the girl as she runs back to her mother, a delicate string of seashells connected by thin pieces of thread dangling from her fingertips.
“Will you keep it forever?”
“Won’t I?” Rings of mirth come to life in her mother’s irises, and she feels she has done a job well done. Without another moment’s haste, she gestures for her mother to move lower and meet at her level. She obeys, moving her hair out to one side as the girl puts the necklace on for her with the utmost care. It does not feel warm or cold to the touch, but temperate against the warmth of her bare neck.
The girl makes herself watch as one of the shells, which has spirals curled in on itself, falls of its own weight on the sand. It is all right, since she prepared herself for failure, and in truth never bothered to tie it together with the rest of the assorted shells in the first place. She mentally pats herself on the back for preventing what would have been a domino effect of collapsing seashells.
“Oh, look at that…” But then her mother crouches down to view what seems to be an especially fascinating mineral among the rest. “Look, dear, it’s wrapped around itself perfectly, sucked in like the billions of stars in the Milky Way...”
She sighed. “Ah, mother? It fell.”
Realizing the weight of her words, she immediately regrets what she said. Not because it is wrong, but because her mother had to hear it. Accurate to her worries, her mother stands back up with her confusion on full display. Picking up that same shell again, she tilts it so that all the sand it collected falls out, too. Then, she glances at her, then back to the shell, like it is the answer to an unspoken question.
“It’s okay.”
The girl waits for an explanation that doesn’t come. “I know it’s okay.”
“No, it's okay.” Her mother pockets the shell, a new ornament. “The tighter you hold onto sand, the faster it falls. So, it’s best to let it fall on its own.”
The girl squints at first, but then lets her eyes enlarge at the revelation. A confession sits at the tip of her tongue, and she feels her tonsils beginning to swell. “But there’s no point in admiring things that disappear on you, fragile things. It’s best to leave them be so that you don’t waste any time at all.”
“Oh. And if you do that, you live your life in fear of what could have been if you just extended your hand. If there is one thing life is not, that would be ‘set in stone’. You may think–”
“Maybe I’m just not there yet.”
For several moments, they stared into each other’s eyes, because the girl’s eyes had a storm brewing in them and there is only one thing left to agree on; some stories are best left untold. “Hmm, maybe.”
And so, she briskly turned on her heels, withdrawing like a receding wave to the shoreline. At least the necklace remained intact. As the pair watch the heat of the sun setting the sea on fire, her mother– the woman– consolidates with her second brain, which has been tapering at the fringes. She is the past that has been confused for the future. If the future, too, is afraid of the liminal space between existence and non-existence, they may as well all be soulless.
“Have you thought about what you will do when I disappear, too?”
The question is not demanding of an answer, but a superimposition for the girl to stow away and consolidate later. The woman watches the sea, while the girl watches her. “No, but have you? We are, after all, very similar. It is not time that I am scared of; it’s loss.”
A load in her chest lightens as the woman exhales an unrushed breath. “You are afraid of shadows. Just don’t let them haunt you, and I think you’ll be okay.”
“Right. And what is to be done about all this time we’re losing?”
The woman faces her searching eyes, and a breath is all it took for her to know.
Dreams, reality, and desire. Dreams, reality, and desire.
What is to be done? The woman, the mother, her reflection, is worlds apart.
So, the girl repeats after her: “I think I’ll be okay.”
Siya is starting her senior year of high school, and has high hopes of refining her writers' craft alongside her studies. She has enjoyed reading and telling stories ever since she was a toddler.
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