Past four years & now.

Into the distance
a ribbon of black
stretched to the point
of no turning back
a flight of fancy
on a wind swept field
standing alone
my sense reeled.
--Learning to Fly / PINK FLOYD



It's been exactly one week today since my mother moved to back to Oklahoma for good.

Last Monday when Adam and I said goodbye to her, it wasn't as lengthy and drawn out like I thought it would be. She was holding tears back, I could tell, as we pulled out of her driveway and waved goodbye. The moment I turned my head away from her and looked out at the road in front of me, I immediately felt different.

The first day without her was breezy, though the different feeling hung around. I tried to shrug it off but I couldn't. I tried to explain how I felt to Ryan, hoping it would make me feel better. He looked at me like I was crazy when I admitted to him that there was a part of me that missed my mother. I explained to him that I felt overwhelmed with the idea of knowing that I couldn't rely on my mother, daily anymore, like I had for... the past four years. [NOTE: It was at that exact moment when I realized how long she'd been with me, every single day.] Truthfully, I knew Ryan wouldn't relate to what I was feeling because I couldn't clearly define or understand it myself. So instead of trying to get answers and empathy from him, I turned my investigation inside out, directing my questions inward this time.

The answer I was searching for finally came to me four days after my mother moved out.

See, I never expected to live with or have my mother live with me until I was 27. It was a series of bad luck circumstances and tragic situations that bonded us together for.... the past four years. It started with my separation from AJ in 2006 and official divorce from him in 2007. Recession kept my mother and I economically bound together in 2008. March 2009 brought about the loss of my father, then losing a loved one to homicide months later in May. The failure of yet another toxic, romantic relationship left a post atom bomb fallout over my life at the end of August 2009. My mother was convinced I could not handle the stress and take care of Adam at the same time. She was right, I couldn't back then.

I regained some of my sanity in the winter of 2009 and decided to move to Texas with my brother, Patrick. Just before I moved, my grandfather, my mother's father, had a stroke and passed away on December 8, 2009. Coincidentally, my father would have been celebrating his 60th birthday on that day if he had lived.

My mother stayed at my side as we went through the past four years, together.

The emotional climax of all the events that took place happened a few moments after we received news about the homicide. I went outside and sat down on a curb in the parking lot of the hotel we were staying at and lit a cigarette. [We were on what was supposed to be a vacation when we were notified.] I remember watching other families coming in and out of the hotel's entrance and noticing two children in particular, skipping closely behind their parents. I wondered what on earth would compel them to want to skip in a world littered with ugliness. Then my observation was interrupted with a sound I had not heard since I was a little girl.

It was the sound of an ice cream truck melody.

I can remember having an instinctual need to get up and run after it, but I didn't. Instead, I put out my cigarette and lit another. I felt my eyes start to water when I took the first drag off of it. At that point I'd grown accustomed to crying, so I wasn‘t startled by the feeling of tears forming in my eyes. Tears and chain smoking were the norm in my world, not skipping or chasing after ice cream trucks. I stayed cemented to the concrete curb as the ice cream truck drove away and it‘s music faded.

The random resurfacing of one of my favorite childhood memories at that moment in my life, I took as a symbol of the end of anything sweet and innocent ever entering or passing through my world, again.

I had forgotten most of that ice cream truck memory until this past Saturday, around 6pm. I was standing outside on the balcony of my house with Ryan when our conversation was interrupted with a familiar tune.

I looked at his face, slightly confused as to the sound’s source, “Do you hear that?” I asked him.
Our conversation died as we stood in silence, trying to define the sound. He replied, “Yeah…it sounds like…”
“It sounds like ’Happy Birthday’,” I quickly interjected. 
He agreed, “It is ‘Happy Birthday’. Weird.”
“Where is it coming from?!” I asked, and before he even had a chance to answer, I started walking back and forth on the balcony, looking down into the neighborhood, trying to find it. The recognizable sound grew louder and clearer as it slowly passed by on the street in front of my house.

It was a man on a bicycle, selling ice cream.

When I heard the song playing I felt comforted. It was like gently waking up from a deep sleep. I thought the tune was appropriate too, because it was time to celebrate a birth, the start of my new life officially beginning with the past four years behind me.

“I feel a lot better suddenly”, I confessed to Ryan, smiling at him.
“Good”, he replied, and he leaned in to hug me.

I don’t know how it’s going to be without my mother in my life everyday. Looking back on it now, it’s hard to fathom everything that’s happened in the past four years. My heart literally aches when I think about it. But after realizing the depths of my experience, knowing that I made it through what I thought would never end, and finally moving on, I feel like I can face what ever may come today and every day after today..

without my mother and without my father.

The past four years is over and its time to start living on my own now.