FATE Prose: In the Other Room

Have you ever seen a baby fighting sleep?
Their drooping eyelids and slackened jaw.

They sense light or noise and they wiggle their delicate necks toward the noise or the new source of brightness. They must feel so heavy and warm and curious. 

I wondered as I watched her,
if that’s what it was like to die.

We accidentally laughed too loud at her death bed. Is this what this place is, a death bed? It didn’t feel like it. It was the living room where we had sipped wine with her and her daughter, a ghost now. 

It’s where I had visited for the last 22 years. I watched as the framed photos morphed from missing teeth, to braces, to perfectly straight porcelain. Blonde hair cropped short, grown long, crimped, curled, highlighted. Certificates of accomplishments replaced with crystal cold vases of her bones, teeth, hair, grit.

But, at this moment, as I watched my absent friend’s mother dying, the room was dark. Memories did not creep up in that moment, because it was a different room. In fact, maybe a different planet. A different universe, a different timeline.

And when we laughed too loud, at a memory from a different room, her head jerked toward us. Eyes fighting for the light, for the sound, for life. 

It’s hard to accept the end, even when it is blinking at us. 

I wonder what I left behind in that room. Besides our dying mother.  

I know somewhere in that other room, there is a crystal cold vase holding parts of me, too.