Days after my mother’s passing was the last time I wrote about grief. It feels just like yesterday, when I still felt her embrace and warmth surrounded me, the smell of her clothes and the eyes that stared at me so dearly; I still somehow feel it until now, so close, so tender, yet so suffocating.
It’s been months since then, I get better but the grief gets even worse. The longing that choked, the guilt that tormented me to death — oh, I wish I were. I wish I died, I wish I could follow wherever she goes, to the ridge or beneath the ground; I wish I could be by her side, waking up to her yelling at me for I am late for school.
It’s been months since then, yet I somehow still wish she was here. Sometimes, I think she is around, or maybe somewhere else and I will eventually get to see her again. Sometimes, I still think that she will come back, in months or years, I still think that she will be standing at the door, with the same her whom I saw for the last time…. “Mama is home…” and why has nobody ever told me that being a desperate motherless child would actually be this suffocating and almost killing every slice of my being?
Because we never learned to be a motherless, we were never trained to be one.
I cried and squeezed myself to death once a week, being reminded of what could have happened if everything stayed the same, or if I took a decision other than what had shaped me now. I cried because she never taught me how to live without her. I cried because she never told me how life would feel like without her. I cried because I am alive and get to see how life actually feels like without her.
It is going to be a whole new and long life without her, knowing that she has missed out so many things in my life and will continue to miss it. I wish she could be there to see me graduate. I wish she was still alive, I wish everything stayed the same. I wish she just went out of town and would be back in days, and when I do, when I wish she was somewhere else, it will just be another punch in the face because the fact, she has completely gone and is nowhere to be found.
If what they say about grief is true, that it will forever live in me, I hope my mother stays and takes part in because the grief will never be as big as my love and longing.
