Three days ago it was my Mom's birthday. For her birthday, my Mom got the chance to perform the bells during a spring service, and serenade the audience with the three notes she plays in the group (F, F#, and G). When the time came for the service, she nailed it. As my Dad described, she made the audience smile and find pleasure in the notes she was assigned to play. She gave her audience an opportunity to smile and obtain pleasure in a very small part of their lives.
This morning I was taking a shower listening to one of my current favorite songs, "Changes" by XXXTentacion. As I was showering (I don't know if it was the song or the gloomy weather I was currently witnessing), but I started thinking of my Mom. While thinking of her...I had no other reaction but to start crying in the shower. At the time, I was really confused. I couldn't justify any explanation as to why thinking of my Mom and her birthday gave me this really intense urge to cry. After a few moments, I got control of myself and shrugged off this brief episode of tears I just experienced.
At the beginning of my freshman year at Wake Forest, I decided to be a part of a pre-orientation program called "B.U.I.L.D." that was getting ready to go through their second year of fruition. I was really nervous, but the program, during the four days, made me learn a lot about myself and gave me some really close friends to battle the first semester of college with. The orientation program itself was really small compared to others so there were a lot more intimate groups.
Now at this point, there's not much, if any, coherency in what I just wrote. Trust me, I'm confused too, mainly because this writing is coming from a different part of me. It's coming from this part of me that made me randomly cry in the shower or lose focus of everything going around me when my Mom with much humility described her bell performance on her birthday.
The reason why I mention these three little anecdotes, hopefully using the right word, is because in each of these moments I experienced an overwhelming wave of intense feelings and emotions that I did not have any justification for. There was no explanation that made sense to me as to why moments like these were so difficult to deal with.
In each of these moments, the only response I had was to cry. I would lose track of what was going on and just begin to break down and slowly unravel to just pure emotion and feelings. Feelings, for the most part, I like to keep to myself.
As the years have gone by now, its become harder and harder to write about her because fewer and fewer words, in my mind, begin to delineate into words how these "gestures" or "moments" with her affect me.
It's confusing because, at least for me, I'm not used to moments like that. Where everything stops and all you can think of is this person you've been with your whole life. It's incomprehensible and therefore the only reaction is tears of joy and appreciation for everything that that person is.
Trying to describe her, as mentioned before, creates a lot of raw emotion but maybe that's just because I'm fearful. I'm scared that if I try to put what she is to me in words...then those words will somehow cause this evanescence of her presence in my life to disappear. A chapter would for some reason be forced to end. A chapter with her in my life. Empty words that are trying to add a beginning and an end to a stream of feelings of happiness that in its simplest sense can't be filtered.
She, alone, gives me that. She alone makes me resort back to the most adolescent development of experiencing and treasuring love. Now that may be over-fearful, but when experiences like the ones mentioned above give someone that much pure happiness and joy, one tends to be overly-cautious because they don't want to even risk losing that. She...is my foundation and I don't want to know what life would be like without her.
Of the many things I love about my mom...her smile is a big one, and if I'm fortunate enough to have the same smile as her, then I'm definitely going to try and smile whenever I can, because it's huge. It's huge in that it does a lot for me whenever I see it. Thinking of her smile makes me think of what she's done for me. It makes me reminisce and naturally causes my eyes to begin squinting.
