CHANGING FACES

mom, i see your face all over the place. but when i do, i am not looking with my eyes. i am seeing the world through yours.

when i cough sometimes, or hiccup, or say certain words, or stub my toe and yell a particular "you-type" of expletive ("GOD BLESS IT!")...i hear your voice coming out of my mouth. i feel the love that was, IS, and will always be YOU, welling up inside this delicate and fragile body. my senses become only the beginning of a much deeper way of engaging in conversation with you. i am forever engulfed in the grace of your spirit; i still learn from you every day, how to be a good person. and what true beauty is.

yesterday, i saw your face in every other cloud cluster. you were cat-like, shark-esque, mysterious and dreamlike; wavy, hazy, bright and brilliant. you were an infinite stream of vaguely recognizable shapes. you were what rose and set within the soul of the sun.

you were amorphous - the art of dance itself - curling through atmospheres like the passion that poured through your pores when you moved to music in your earthly frame. you are the cooing, savory, billowy color of LOVE.

when i hear music, i think of you. when i laugh, i hear your laughter too. when i cry, i drain your absence from its miserable resting place inside my sorrow-stricken heart. when i pray, i thank god for your life eternally entwined with mine. every single time i take a breath, i count one more rotation forward in my movement toward meeting you at the mid-point between where i am and where you are.

every time something happens, i die because i can't call you on the phone and tell you about it. but then i remember...that you already know. every time i speak to someone, i say what i think you might have said. i do what you would have done. every time i have a choice, i take the highest form of action i can fathom, because i am blessed to have learned how to live from you. mom, you were a master at being human. and now, you are flying in new and higher realms.

every time i cry myself to sleep for missing you, i dream of our reunion. i hold your sacred heart in the valves of my own. i pump the life that composed your blood through my own veins. and it never fails: i awaken the next morning with some subtle, new understanding about life and death, which you must have placed gently into the depths of me while i drifted through the night in some other form.