If I Fell

Chapter Fifteen

It turned out what I considered to be morning and what my mother thought of the same thing differed greatly in definition.

While I’d managed to fall into a fretful sleep almost the moment I’d tumbled into bed, the time had been plagued by dreams of a man with a face so obscured by darkness that it was impossible to make out features. He’d appear, walking slowly towards me in dreams at a measured pace from places that I visited during every day life, a classroom to the kitchen. Every time it happened, I’d wake up with a start and be asleep within minutes only to repeat the task.

It wasn’t until about seven in the morning that sleep didn’t grace me again. I’d laid with my eyes wide open against the pillow, knowing that there were thousands of things I should be thinking about, yet I couldn’t force myself to do more than blink blankly at my bare wall.

Although it was atrociously early for a Saturday morning, I rolled out of bed to have a shower. And yet I still couldn’t bring myself to do more than stare at the tiled walls as I went about the shower with a single mindedness that would be quite handy if it could be drawn upon to meditate with.

The problem was that this wasn’t meditation and I should have been thinking.

By the time it was ten o’clock, I’d managed to get dressed and groomed carefully for the day. I knew I should be foreboding for what was awaiting me, but I just sat with dry eyes on my bed, letting the moments tick away until it was an appropriate time to be awake.

It was a beautiful morning, sun shining through the windows and curtains to alight the hallway and the path I took all the way down the winding staircase that lead to our enormous entryway. Yet I didn’t really notice. I had my elbow cupped by a hand as I wandered listlessly, chewing on my lip and staring at the ground.

To my surprise when I entered the kitchen, it was empty. Instead of walking in immediately and making my habitual morning tea, I hesitated in the doorway, my arm dropping from where it had been crossed tightly against my stomach to hang lifelessly beside my body.

I always found my mother in the kitchen in the mornings, going through her routine of drinking coffee and going straight through the town’s newspaper as well as The New York Times. It was something that I just relied upon, the only times that changed was when she was on a business trip. It didn’t matter if it was a school morning or not. Sometimes it was the only time I saw her in the day, even if it was just for a few stolen moments.

After one more look around, just to make sure she wasn’t taking ideas from the unknown man in my dreams and hiding in a corner, I swallowed and stepped into the empty kitchen.  

By the time I was on my third cup of tea, still pushing around the cereal that had bypassed soggy and was beginning to disintegrate into the milk as I shoved my spun around the bowl lethargically, and my mom hadn’t bothered to make her presence known.

It wasn’t until I had drained my cup and was eyeing the kettle with thought to a fourth when I finally gave up waiting for her.

Four cups would make a mockery of my decision to stop drinking coffee because the caffeine that it possessed could have me bouncing off the walls. Tea was supposed to take the edge off while still giving me a bit of a jolt. I took the time to dump the contents of my bowl in the sink and placing the tableware in the dishwasher before I exited the still eerily empty kitchen to climb back up the stairs.

However when I was face to face with my mom’s bedroom door that was sealed off from the rest of house, I touched the door handle then dropped it as if I’d been burned. And, though I stared at it, I couldn’t bring myself to open the door and disrupt her privacy.