The games we play

Mother is home again. I kept her flowers alive but I'm not sure she noticed. The scent of her perfume (Cartier de Lune) slowly fills the apartment, I hear her footsteps and the little songs she sings when she's happy. They make me happy too, when I ask her where she's been she just smiles and tells me I look pretty.

The first days are always like this. I realize I've missed her, maybe because I'm not good at being alone, but I'll soon feel suffocated and wish she would leave again. I'll regret it when she does and worry about something happening to her, so that the last thing I ever said to her was something other than "I love you".

And in all of this I can never forget those words from her diary I found after my father died, what she wrote on a train thundering through the Russian wilderness over 30 years ago:

What I'm certain of, what I saw so clearly through that window, is that I never want to put a child into this world. I could never live with the notion that some day they would be left all alone.