The Painting

#57 The Moon - An Ghealach

No nightmare, but my body didn't seem to care. As if waking up due to the shock of my unconscious had become the new normal - one of my body's natural rhythms. I tilted my head up to look at the clock.

2:41am.

I didn't feel as I usually did when I awoke from a nightmare. I struggled to define the feeling, there was no fear or dread, but there was no happiness or excitement either. Was I in emotional limbo? If there was such a thing.

I turned on my side to see Lyle peacefully asleep, her head resting just enough to the side where her hair cascaded over her left cheek. For a moment I lay there finding content in the unburdened hour until the feeling I couldn't place leached its way into my gut again.

My woven blanket sat at the foot of the mattress and I grabbed it slinging it around my shoulders before descending down the ladder. I would let Lyle sleep tonight.

The air was warm as I lay on my back in the middle of the greenspace. The moon shone bright through the otherwise pitch black night sky and I felt as if she shone directly on the spot where I lay. Grey and black blemishes were clear tonight and reminded me of my locket as I studied the craters in her sides. How beautiful, staring at the moon could be so personal as if you were holding an intimate conversation, yet the light that she reflected upon me was the same that shone on a person halfway around the world.

When I was younger I spent hours staring up at the moon wishing she could speak, but now I think I relish her quiet more. She was constant, maybe not in shape and not even all the time in vision but you always knew she was there. Even when you couldn't see her you knew. I smiled to myself as I rubbed my locket with my thumb in a soothing motion.

"What are you thinking about?" Lyle's soft voice sailed through the silence as she appeared at my side.

"The moon."

"Ah, mind if I join?"

I nodded and she rested her head beside mine.

"Lyle, if she could speak what do you think she would say?"

"She?"

"The moon."

Lyle hummed in response shifting her gaze from me to the question above us. "I don't think she'd say anything, even if she could talk. I think she'd just smile down at us like she is now."

"I like that."

"Good I passed the test."

I wrapped my arms around her planting a kiss at the base of her chin trying to ignore the feeling that persisted in my gut. But then it struck me as soon as I folded myself around Lyle's body, the feeling was loneliness. Guilt tapped on my heart immediately after the thought. I couldn't be lonely, I had Lyle, Grace, and now Frankie.

Was I really so poor at diagnosing my own emotions?

Then it hit me.

"Do you think my mother was alone?"

She paused for a moment. "Why do you say that?"

"The only relationship she mentioned was Monroe, there's nothing about friends or family. If she had people that loved her why would they let her go back to Monroe a year later, why wouldn't they have come for me? How could someone be so isolated? Wasn't she lonely?" I tried to place myself in my mother's shoes but they didn't seem to fit, my heels wouldn't slide past the edges. The dull pain in my gut wasn't a reflection of my own worry but an anxiety over how my mother must have felt. By choice or by circumstance she was alone. And it hurt me in as a human but more acutely selfishly. I was my mother's daughter after all, would I take after her?