Where She Wants to Be

I was speaking to someone about something as I left the room.  The details up until now are unimportant.

As I leave one room and step into another, I recognize my surroundings and stop short:  my old house in MA and, specifically, the room we called the Other Side.  Despite having lost this house in 2008, I have just stepped through time.  I instinctively know that I am my present self, fifty three, a mother, an orphan, a teacher - everything that I currently am, yet here I stand, rapidly blinking, taking it all in, every detail of the room just as it was before I left.  I am dreaming of the past.

Or am I?  Perhaps everything I've come to accept as "reality" over the last few years is the dream, and I am actually still living in MA, still a captive of the house on North Common Street in North Brookfield.  This  second possibility scares me.  I feel unbalanced, tilted off the axis I have taken for granted as "fact."  Which is it?  Whom do I ask?  I am alone in the Other Side.  My heart beats harder as I turn back and go out the door I just entered, afraid to see whatever is out there but needing to get my bearings.

The dining room.  Wait, this is somehow wrong.  There is my grandmother's set in the center, my mother's china cabinet between the front windows, everything in its place, even the shag wall-to-wall rug that I have always hated.  One of the first changes that I made when I moved in as an adult was to pull up that twenty five year old monstrosity.  And that's when it hits me:  this room, as I am seeing it, no longer exists, hasn't existed for more years than I have been in North Carolina.  This is the setting of my childhood home.  I am, I realize with relief, dreaming.

It occurs to me in this moment that this dream-flashback may have much more to offer, if I can just hang onto it.  As if I willed it to happen (and perhaps I have), I hear a noise upstairs.

"Ma?"  I call out, fearing disappointment.  Then I hear it, her voice in response.

I tear through the room, rounding the corner, taking the steep stairs as fast as I dare, terrified that I will wake before I can see her, talk to her.  At the very top of the stairs, I turn toward my old bedroom, and there she is, the woman without whom I once could not imagine my life, the only person whose love for me was unconditional:  my mother.  Not the strong, healthy mother from my childhood, but the slightly stooping, slightly frail mother who passed in 1996 and no less beautiful to me.

I throw my arms around her, sobbing like a child, and tell her that I miss her.  I miss laughing with her and talking on the phone with her and shopping with her, and it never gets any easier.  The feeling of loss never lessens, and I know it never will.  And in the seconds that I am in her arms, feeling her love wrapped around me, all of these thoughts go through my head, but all I can manage to choke out is "I miss you."

My mother does not cry.  Ever the nurturer, she tightens her arms around me and says, "I miss you, too."

The moment is fleeting, and I know the dream will soon end.  We release our hold on each other, and she steps back.  Already my surroundings are beginning to fade.  "Wait," I call out, desperately wanting just a little bit more.  Some piece of reassurance.  "Where are you?" I say.  It's awkward and blurted out, but she knows what I'm trying to ask.

"I'm right here," she says and looks around.  Of course she would, if at all possible, return to the house where she was born and where she spent her whole life.  "I stay here but, sometimes, I travel."  Her expression turns slightly mischievous.

Can this be true?  Even though I know I'm dreaming, I cling to the hope that there's some psychic thread allowing her to communicate with me.

"Do you . . . ever travel to see me?"

She only smiles in answer, and, again, of course she would, if at all possible, watch over me, her only daughter, letting me know, now and then, that she's still out there.  Just as she has this morning.