Inseparably Yours

Inseparables. Mother and son.The year is 2014. The mother let us say will never see 35 again.The son is still some way away from a decade.
Daily routines monotonous unchanging like the holy sacrament. The child is fast asleep when the mother tiptoes out of bed.ties her dressing  gown yawns reluctant to leave the blanket and its warmth.Sullenly tidies her hair and house.Washes up the tea cups wishing for the hundredth time for a magical household genie to help.Sends her spouse off to work with tea and breakfast.
Then the morning ritual drink for her son is prepared. Milk with chocolate or cocoa.
Son is lifted slowly out of his cocoon of sleep and arranged lovingly on her lap where he laps up the milk.Eyes closed in  sweet slumbering innocence.
And time is slow and soft and languorously golden.
The  day is young the hours aplenty.
The  child cradles in   his mother's arms nestles for some more love and affection.
She folds the bed clothes draws back the curtains rhythmically bringing the boy to alertness to the daytime wakey world from the nighttime fuzzy one.
In a few minutes he is padding about demanding biscuits then a drink.She is cajoling him to brush then to complete breakfast.
Playfully encouraging him to count color and identify shapes.
It takes up centuries till bathtime.
That followed by lunch followed by tired efforts to hum his favorite lullabies. As the mother cranks out a jaded faded version of hush little baby her child is magically hushed,
sleep arriving to envelope the active mind and limber body.
The mother is stilled in devotion. Her voice rises an  octave higher in gratitude and she sounds like a choir of angels. The music flows and flows like a timeless river.She cannot stop singing  her memories out till she is drowning in the love in her heart.Melting in melodic expression of both her longings and her satiety. 
Till the tired voice cracks a little and she has to stop for breath.
Tick tock..
Time 's clock..sounds louder.
The body of evidence grows to show that  very nothingness is in universal flux.
Bones lengthen and strengthen hair and nails  rigidly grow, new baby flesh layers supinely upon the old flesh and envelopes it, till old is crushed to nothingness and the new is matured and come to fruition.. The stuff of life dynamic evolving.Revolving. Devolving. Erasing pasts. Raising the frameworks of futures upon  old edifices.
The weft and warp of each nanosecond. From primal urge to fusion.From moment of conception to seed of creation. From gestation to generation.Nativity to dead man 's natation .
And then the calender shape shifts zooms past.Time s clock blurs...
The year is 2060.
Time 's theatre has taken the mother off the stage.
The son is middle aged and has donned rimless glasses, acquired a wife and two little children.
His face is rotund his eyes anxious, owl like . He loses sleep every night . Wakes  up another hour nearer to dawn every day..
His wife leaves a flask of warm milk by his bed side table. He has begun getting up at 3 a.m and the doctor  has warned lack of uninterrupted sleep ensures early health breakdowns.
The boy is long gone.The slim youthful limbs thickened into ungainly trunks  silken hair depleted but as he sips the milk at 3 a.m he is hushed awash in quiet memories. Tick tock..
Time 'clock..Mother no more..no more... merely arty photos on the mantlepiece.
Hush! The living essence was erased  out of existence a decade ago. The pain is not fresh. Or festering.Withered agonies now. Though she was bade goodbye in a daze.
The last few years of his mother's life a husk of her former vibrant presence, of her  captain courageous brand of intimidating leadership.
There remained her son.After deadening his pains nightly  on wet pillows one fateful afternoon there remained finally the memories.
Those final markers.Of Time.There they were-The memories. Of bygone eras bygone people bygone times.
With the son's approaching ill health intimating old age and mortality the memories of his mother stood resurrected. As if fearing death and dimunition.
Like colossal sentinels at time portals, like defiant flag bearers of the posterns of our mortal fate they were crying and shrieking to avoid shrinkage. .
Look out son We will be gone!
For as you remember me so will your children you...
But who will remember. ...
Me?
The son hears in his heart echoes of incomplete journeys,of his own self enforced closure: Dear mother indeed, who will remember you ?
When  I am only a memory ?
Indeed is that all there is to it then? The cup of life drunk who shall testify to long gone love? when our spaces have been long  vacated and  a short clipped "To -Let" sign been hung over the entrance gates. . old familar  homes denuded even of ghosts.
Denied entrance.
There is somewhere an answer that can think and speak for itself.The  answer eludes him.  Denied entrance. Crying you come Muted you go.Thinks the son.
To that final destination without a return ticket.
The dates and numbers all match up as every dozen years or so the cycling years repeat the same pattern of days and dates.
This year mother's birth and death anniversaries will fall once again on Tuesday and Thursday like they did that first morning she breathed in and the dark night she took her last breath.
Oh! The timeless careless years.How they return but never to repeat the same story nevermore to replay the same sweet drama of our individual lives...
The son's glasses are wet and reflect the quiet unearthly light of breaking dawn...He is spent. .His life ebbs as for the last time in his life he looks in love at the dead eyes in the photograph.
His once upon a living loving  mother mounted upon a wall.

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(c) Amrita Valan 2014