March 2009
Mum has been tired lately.
She never used to nap in the afternoon, but these past weeks when I come home she's already lying down. I pass her room on the way to the kitchen to get water and the door is open a crack, and she's there on her side, her hand near her face, sleeping deeply.
I didn't ask her what was wrong. I thought she was probably just busy. I thought rest would fix it.
April 2009
Mum has been going to the hospital. Several times now.
She doesn't tell me what for. She just says "just a check, it's nothing." But each time she comes back she looks different — not tired. Something else. The way people look when they're carrying something heavy they haven't put down yet.
One afternoon I came home early and found her sitting in the living room in the dark with the lights off, hands in her lap, doing nothing. I called her name and she turned around and smiled and said "Noah, you're home, are you hungry."
The smile was real. But before the smile, there was something on her face that she hadn't finished putting away, and I saw it. I didn't know what to call it. I didn't want to know.
May 2009
Mum was admitted to hospital.
I went to see her. She was lying in the bed and she looked smaller, and she held my hand and didn't say much — just asked about school, asked if I'd been eating, asked if I was still practising piano. I said yes. She said play for me when I get home.
I nodded.
I knew that "when I get home" was a difficult thing to say. But I nodded anyway, because I didn't know what else to say.
June 2009
Mum is gone.
I can't write that day very completely. I only remember the white, so much white, and a piece of music — her favourite, played on piano. I sat and listened until it ended.
She'd played that piece many times. The first time she taught me, my fingers kept landing wrong, and she put her hand over mine — very lightly, barely pressing, just guiding one note at a time.
That is the thing I remember most clearly. Not her face. Not anything she said. That hand placed over mine.
December 2009
The piano lid has been closed since then. I haven't opened it.
Not because I don't want to. Because every time I stand in front of it and start to reach for the lid, the feeling arrives before I've touched anything, and I'm not ready for it.
She said the piano could help you forget the pain. For me it now holds something else.
September 2015
Dad showed me what he's built in the lab today.
He spent six years on it. I thought I'd known that for a long time, but standing in front of the machine, I understood for the first time what those six years actually were. What he was actually doing. He wanted me to be able to see her again.
He didn't say much. He just let me look, and think.
That is his way. He is not good at words. But he does very large things, and then waits for you to see them.
September 2015
I used the machine for the first time.
I don't want to write too much detail. Only: I saw her.
She was there, real in every way. I sat down beside her and she looked at me the way she always had. And then she reached over and lightly touched my earlobe.
Just that. Light, easy, as if she wasn't even aware of doing it.
And in that moment I understood what I had actually been missing for six years. Not her voice. Not her face. That one small thing. Small enough that I'd assumed, somewhere along the way, I had already forgotten it.
I hadn't forgotten it.
October 2015
Dad said I couldn't use it anymore. I told him I understood.
But the feeling is still there — in my earlobe, in the place where it happened — in a spot that is very difficult to pretend doesn't exist.
January 2016
Today in the corridor I heard a girl talking to her friend. She said she'd had a dream. Her voice was light when she said it — but that particular lightness that isn't actually light, the kind where you're trying to make something smaller than it is, and the trying makes it heavier.
I didn't approach her. I just stood nearby for a moment, listened, and walked on.
But I kept thinking about that sentence afterward.
I know that voice. I know what it means.