I am an owl, not a lark. I do not think I can be otherwise. My brain does not function until I have had my first meal of the day, which is usually lunch. I start warming up in the afternoons. But from dinner to dawn, I am wide awake. After the sun sets and just before the morning breaks, my mind goes into overdrive. I jest that I always have 27 tabs open. From dinner to dawn, however, the number shoots up. In the stillness of the night, ideas spill out of my brain instantaneously. My body becomes a hive of activity. Solitude becomes me. Silence brings clarity.
Once in a while, I hear a sound. Is it a door opening? Is it the wall whispering? Sometimes, it is the wind. And sometimes, I wonder if it is not. The master bedroom sits in silence, frozen in time, just as my parents left it. They both spent their last moments there as they wished. It is a stone's throw from where I spend evenings and early mornings, alone, writing, mulling, weeping, ranting, raving, posing existential questions to myself. When I hear a sound, I stop whatever I am doing to hear more or better. I turn my chair around to see if there is anyone out there. I know it is wildly impossible, but I am still hoping to see my parents.
When my mother was alive, she would occasionally go inside their ancestral home, unoccupied for ages by humans and inhabited only by birds that had grown comfortable, nesting in the windows. No one really relished setting foot in the grand but old and abandoned house. Except my mother. I think the house brought back cherished memories of her own mother. The house, while eerie, did bring back wonderful childhood summer memories of my own. 'Are you not afraid?' I would ask her. 'Of what?' she would retort. 'Of ghosts? When you love someone, you are never afraid of seeing them again. Because, in fact, you want to see them again.'
I now understand my mother. Because whenever I hear a sound at three in the morning, I turn around, not in fear but in anticipation that though truly a long stretch, my parents might have come to visit. I know it is not happening, but I rest in the thought that they keep watch over me all the time. When I sleep, when I wake up, when I am sad, when I am drained, when I sit in front of the blank screen and struggle to find the words to describe what life is like when the people you love are lost to you forever. I know they see me when my tears fall, when my heart breaks, when I feel only God can give me credit for the things I continue to do and bear witness to the things I never did. I know they are clicking their tongues when I am scrubbing the floors and working myself to death at dawn or running like mad at 12 midnight because that is when temperatures are cooler, dreams are bolder, and hearts are braver. I can picture my father's head peeking out his bedroom door saying, 'What are you doing?' While my mother would likely say, 'Haven't you done enough?'
Yesterday, it has been two years since my father passed. Today, it is Mother's Day. And I miss them both very much. I have been on a mission since last week: going over files to decide which to chuck and which to keep. But some ties have to end. And disposing of old files from old ties, whether personal or professional, also feels like a death. As the purging continues, so must the reliving of both happy and heartbreaking memories. I still hear the sounds. I know they will never show. So now, I do not turn around. I finally understand I do not have to see them to feel their love. I could tell you I saw my parents. But I am a truth teller, not a liar. You cannot make an owl a lark.
