air
She’s my mother’s age, crying hazel eyes, brown long curly hair, white shirt clean and ironed crisp, homeless. She has a daughter my own age. Two grandchildren she loves, a girl and a boy. She doesn’t know how it came to this. To sleeping in her car, on a friend’s couch when she can. Sometimes her daughter lets her stay. She looks after her grandchildren while her daughter is at work. She loves her days with them. Cooking big hearty meals, playing games, telling stories. She gets tired more easily than she used to. Her body aches even when she sleeps stretched out on her daughter’s spare bed. When he comes home at 6 pm she goes to her room, the guest room, and stays there. Her daughter tells her not to come back out until after he’s gone to bed, pleads with her to be careful, to be quiet, not to wake him, not to disturb. They’ve never really gotten along and when he sees her, hears her, those nights she hears her daughter cry. He’s a big man, she knows the sound bones make when they break clean. I hold my hand close to hers while she speaks. She doesn’t know how it came to this, to have no place to call her own. I tell her that it’s good that she came today, that I’ll listen for as long as she wants to talk. It’s just that I’ve started to lose hope she says and the red hot knot in my chest throbs.
I sit across from her expecting very little. This is work suggested counselling, gentle but persistent. I don’t want to find the words, I expect the same derision, the same critique. Over emotional, too soft, naive. I tell her this and she nods, me too. She tells me that naive is a compliment, that there’s an innocence to naive that is rare and lovely. I feel so far from innocence, from lovely. We talk about the feeling of caring, the feeling of wanting to make better, to soothe, to solve. We talk about other ways of coping, of numbing yourself to the story. We sit quietly and smile at one another. Human amongst machinery she reminds us both, Don’t let the dark in. I don’t want to leave. I want to sit in this sun lit room for a few minutes more. I want to sit with this woman who calls me soul sister, who reminds me that what I am is good, that who I am is better than I allow myself to be. I think about all the time that passes between. She walks with me to the elevator and we hug like old friends, email addresses exchanged.
I help her fill out forms, I tell her about wait times and wait lists. She nods when I say two years. It doesn’t matter, I can wait she says, You’ve given me something to hold onto, that’s all I need love. She takes my hand in hers and I want to tell her, come home with me, live with me, love me, I miss my mom.
There is so much helplessness in what I do. It’s the easiest thing to get stuck in. For someone like me. I remember every you. I swallow up what she calls the dark. That metaphor I’ve never liked. At the very centre, somewhere beneath my ribs it sits. Light and dark. Together. Whole. I write only to remember lessons learned.
