Breaking Loose

I remember the day my mother died. Needless to say, it's impossible to forget. That morning, a great and burning fire died out, slowly losing its brightness and vanishing right in front of my naive child's eyes. I watched her as she was passing away, leaving me here, surrounded by my grieving family, alone amongst the crowd.

However, if you had asked me to describe what the weather was like that Wednesday or whether the wall clock struck eight or nine, I wouldn't be able to recall. Not because of the tears streaming down my face and blurring my vision. Not due to the tight squeeze of my mother's hand. Nor was it the blood pounding in my ears what was at fault. No - the vague memories of the surroundings and events accompanying my mom's decease were caused by the way I was gazing at her alabaster bare chest. A snow-white plain, violated only by a long scar in the color of rubies. The river of scarlet, breaking her fragile body into two pieces, a crack that invited the unearthly light in to take her withering heart.

I hated this mark that a big bad wolf, known as cancer, left on my mother's beautiful appearance. It tasted like blood, death and the smell of sanitary gel used in all the hospitals we spent the last years in. It reminded me of the hope I felt, when the doctors told us there's an eligible donor whose lung would replace my mother's non-functional one. The terrible pang seized my mind when we found out it didn't work. That the crevice they'd made into my innocent mother was useless and vain.

Since then, I avoided this symbol of despair. Until that Wednesday. That morning, my eyes were fixed on the scar that represented an entrance for the light that took the most important person of my life away.

My mother always considered all people to be creatures of light. She'd seen them as creations, whose whole substance is formed by glistening rays of glare. When I was little and I hurt my knee cycling, when a fiery pain heated up my knuckles and I burst into tears, she bent down and caressed my fair hair. "Don't cry honey, you'll be allright. Nothing happened."

"But my leg aches so much. Look! I'm broken now," I pointed at my scratched knee, still whimpering. A lovely smile appeared on my mother's face, as she answered. "We are all broken, sweetheart, but that's how the light gets in."

So when I saw the awful scar, the sign of my mom being broken as well, I hated the light. Because it took her from me. Through this aperture, the light slithered into her body and stole her last breath. The breath that first gave me life, then raised my hopes and, in the end, crushed my heart and broke me into pieces.

Barbora Trnková