Paris

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It’s in the silence of the night, in those moments that precede sleep, when the worst of nightmares are most likely to assail us and make us turn for comfort to the warm illusion of the person sleeping at our side, that’s when the memory of my mother becomes omnipresent and knocks at the door of my consciousness like an outcast knocking at the door to reclaim the place from which he was once expelled. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, fears and regrets I assumed to have been long since vanquished overwhelm me and fog my thoughts. I suddenly find myself torn between lamentation, which is a reproach to her, because her presence is no longer enough to fill everything around me with significance, and sadness, which is a reproach to myself, for failing to realize that she was once a child, too, and, like me, will never again have someone who can assuage her dread of failure and oblivion.

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