When My Mother Became the Sea

One evening I found her in the yard,
planting spoons in the soil
as though they might bloom into roses.
She looked up at me with a smile I didn’t recognize
and asked if I was hungry.
I said yes, though my throat was filled with stones.

Later, she pressed a sweater into my hands,
said it was mine—
but it was the one she knitted for herself
the winter Dad died.
It still smelled faintly of her perfume,
and I held it like a relic,
like proof she had once remembered warmth.

Some nights she would call my name,
but it wasn’t me she wanted.
It was the child I used to be,
the one who ran barefoot through sprinklers
while she clapped her hands from the porch.
I answered anyway,
knowing I could never give her back
what she was asking for.

And the worst of it isn’t her forgetting—
it’s that she remembers just enough
to know something is missing.
Her eyes go wide with panic,
her fingers flutter through the air
as if clawing for a rope in the dark.
I watch her drown in her own house,
the air thick with a silence I cannot lift.

This is not death,
but the rehearsal of it.
A thousand small funerals
before the last one comes.
Each day I bury another version of her:
the mother who knew my secrets,
the mother who sang me to sleep,
the mother who made soup when I was sick.
Graves upon graves upon graves,
stacked inside my chest.

And still, I keep showing up.
Because somewhere beneath the ruin,
she is still there—
a flicker, a tide,
a wave that breaks and vanishes
before I can touch it.

When my mother became the sea,
I stood on the shore,
calling her name
until my voice was nothing
but salt.

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