Homesickness

My mother has had a reprieve. A stay of execution, as she calls it. How maudlin, one might think, How dramatic. She's entitled. I do not know the dark place a diagnosis of inoperable cancer takes you.

I wonder just how dark it is.

I wonder if it is so dark you cannot see anything but your own fear, like bile, bubbling over everything and souring it all. It doesn't seem like that, for her. She seems calm. She seems kinder. She listens more. But how would I really know? I am far away, and too poor for the air fare. How would I know how she feels?

The sky does not look the same here as it does at home. It's bigger. The sky looks bigger. The light is different. My mother hated it. It's different, for me. This is where I was born. I do not look up at the sky and holler my hatred for the land the way she did, for ten years, until she fled back, clutching her children's hands and a fistful of desperate dollars. I look up at the sky, though. I find no answers there. I wonder what I'm looking for.