Evening

One of those nights where my son climbs into bed with me in the middle of the night, sleeps right next to me, wakes me up after four hours of sleep, and then I just can’t fall back asleep no matter how tired I am.

I woke up out of a dream where I saw my mother. She asked me to come along with her for an evening of just idling around. We were living somewhere I’d never actually seen before, no one else around, just the two of us. We stepped out, took a bus or an auto, I don’t quite remember which, and ended up somewhere that felt like a resort. There were dances happening, food stalls, other people out for an evening walk.

We sat and watched the sunset for a while. After an hour or so, she said we should head back before it got dark, so we tried to, but there were no buses or autos to be found anywhere. She started panicking. The distance on the map read about 2.7 km, and even though she’d walked distances like that her whole life without a second thought, she was suddenly worried she couldn’t make it back on foot. I kept trying to figure out some other way home, but nothing came up. That’s when I woke up.

I was still lying in bed, barely awake, when it hit me: I have never, not once in my entire life, spent a single day or evening with my mom where the two of us were just outside, idling, with nowhere in particular to be.

She ran on a long, fixed routine, always doing something, every single day. She’d wake up early and throw herself into the house and the kitchen, even though we had help around for most of our lives. Whenever we did step outside, it was for shopping, temple visits, seeing relatives, or the occasional trip, almost always a religious one.

We never once sat down somewhere outside just to watch a sunset. I don’t know if her life simply never offered her that kind of luxury, or if my own life never gave us that kind of time together, given how much of it I spent away from home. The only idling we ever really did together was on scorching summer afternoons, when the power would come back for a bit and she’d nap through the heat of the noon. Sometimes she’d come sit in front of the cooler and chat with me for a while. And in the evenings, she’d make herself a coffee and sit down for maybe 25 minutes. Those were really the only times we ever sat together. But always inside the house.

It feels strange that what I saw in that dream felt so completely foreign to me. It just left me sad, somehow.