Serenity

Mother in her delicate florals on the terrace, summer night winds in her eumelanin bird's-nest hair. How she turns to me and smiles, the image of her effortlessness forever captured like a snapshot in my mind. I know it's Los Angeles vibrating deep in the background, the smell of lavender and red wine and the blue of the ocean.

And years later, how I watch her as she tears her light summer dresses to shreds, leaving them slaughtered and scattered across the floors for me to mourn. These images are harsh, unfiltered and saturated, but maybe it's just the way I want to remember things.

The girl on the terrace became an orphan when everything changed. The woman she called mother is another today, unrecognizable but still a mother. She has qualities too but the light is different, her hair heavier, the way she used to smile a childish fantasy.