Photo by The Cleveland Museum of Art on Unsplash
You might be flat on your back, picking at loose fibers in a worn Turkish rug you inherited from your mother, who managed a Pier 1 Imports when she was nineteen back in 1976, and the fibers might remind you of worms, your first playmates as a child, and the time you ate three of them plucked fresh from beneath a rock in your suburban childhood yard.
Your mom may have surprised you, not by saying oh god that’s icky, sweetie, but instead, honey, no, those are your friends and you might realize, rolling the fibers between your thirty-five-year-old fingers, how lucky you were to have a mother open to such friendships.
Five years after that, you might strain a muscle in your shoulder hoisting that old rolled rug, cradling it like an unwieldy infant as you carry it to the bed of some friend’s red pickup, because you’ll probably always have a friend with a truck to help you move in the same way you’ll always have a six-pack to offer in return, and it’s unlikely you’ll be able to buy a house, so you’ll be moving to another sunny one-bedroom, partitioned off in another Victorian mansion that hasn’t been whole in a half-century at least, and you might notice the rug somehow still smells like your mother’s hair when you unroll it.
Five years after that, there could be a baby, but probably not, and some afternoon you might flip through a stack of photos and see your chubby toddler arms reaching up, fingers clutching mom’s freckled hands, which you’d recognize even though she’d be out of frame, and you might spot a familiar pattern beneath your little baby feet.
You might look down between barely middle-aged knees to see the pattern mirrored below, and maybe chuckle to yourself or even feel a pressure inside your chest, so you might call her, or you might not, because by that time she might not know who you are, or she might not be able to answer the phone, or she might be wandering in a field, brushing hands over long grasses, floating on her back in an endless ocean, growing tall, stretching toward the sky, arms turning to branches, fingers turning to leaves, or any other number of gentle euphemisms.
She might be sitting right in front of you, feet pressed into the rug, only you can’t see her.
Sarah Lynn Hurd is a writer and poet based in Michigan. She has work in Fractured Lit, HAD, Flash Frog, Anti-Heroin Chic, and elsewhere. Her writing often explores grief, nostalgia, womanhood, and self-perception. Stop by sarlynh.com to visit her.
