Nervousness is a beautiful feeling when you seem to think you know all the answers.
If only the feeling hadn’t ended with petals of sweet scented venom trailing with the twisted bouts of time.
It was Friday morning. The place that I call home was filled with sounds of my living. The others had gone long ago. My mother’s voice gently beat against the drums, asking, “Come home. It’s a long weekend. Everyone is home but you.” Gently I reply, “Too much to do Mom. I am so sorry.”
I wanted to hold a lighter sigh at the finish line.
At twelve, my doorbell rang. I had everything set. The most comfortable chairs around the table, light, pens, paper, notes, books. Only the minds were left.
She came in, smiling her motherly smile. Her presence is not a quiet one. It awakens the doze, her familiar perfume light but noticeable. Tall, nimble, with a splash of tomboyishness to her elegance. Her curled waves of brown locks held back with a rubber band, hidden clumsily under a claw-clip.
Of all the people I’ve met, I adore her accent the most.
America received her six years ago from Brazil. She was a mother of a two year old son. Her goal in life? To get into medical school. For her first year and half, she cleaned houses. She started ESL courses at the community college while taking science courses, through which she read entire textbooks with a dictionary by her side, scoring near perfects on the tests. She went through Oraganic Chemistry in her second pregnancy, giving birth to a another baby boy right after taking the final midterm.
C.P. is a name people treat with love and respect.
She has yet to say mine right.
And it is this that I adore. Her words come out like play dough wrapped around the spellings. Anything with -ed models itself boldly: continued becomes continu-ED, obtained becomes obtain-ED. We all smile at her. Why fix when right is canceled by sincerity?
For two days and a half, we toiled. We underlined, we wrote, we discussed, we tested, we theorized, we corrected, we understood.
Genetics.
So ~much~ in a single word!
There were those beautiful butterflies about when the Midterm was laid before us.
Start.
And doom stank. How could it not when you can stare at a 14 point question with absolutely no idea of the answer?
My mother’s sigh heaved so heavily in my head.
She walked out. I could see it.
The money she paid the baby sitters. The time she spent away from her two little boys and husband. The effort of 36 plus hours wasted away.
To have to wipe away tears from those eyes was enough to not shed my own.
To have to watch the very woman who had been offered a place in a research laboratory the previous day curse the woman who had given it was enough to hold my own back.
I had suffered nothing to her…
The sense of success is always due to the doubt of failure.
Why had it existed?
