Reflections, if you will

The first thing that happened today was I woke up and checked my email. It's obsessive; I do it from bed. My professor had already responded to a frantic email I wrote him not 8 hours prior, and used short sentences to tell me everything would be okay, and to come up with at least two solutions to what was bothering me. We'll talk Monday. I rolled back over, silently, infinitely, thanking him for responding so promptly and gracefully on Mother's Day morning.

The next thing that happened was that I made coffee, and reminded my roommate that it was Mother's Day, by positing that we feel the same way about this morning. I feel bad about reminding her, and wonder if it was a big deal when her mom was around. Because, in fact, we can't feel the same way. Alive is alive; I can't know how she feels.

But I do feel like that woman doesn't belong to me. Like anything I say about her is subject to scrutiny by those who know better. That I have no room to criticize. That any anger I have is misplaced.
Mostly, I feel like being caught by the kitchen mirror with thin, downturned pink lips, dark brown eyebrows, thick hair, and her chin is a flight of my overactive imagination. Like seeing yourself for a moment in a picture of some television actress.
But letting down the guard of my pale skin, big blue eyes, and his tiny nose, there we are.
She and I aren't frowning, this is just our listening face.
There are the habits I can't explain. Coffee, cigarettes, picking at my cuticles, and cracking my jaw. Language acquisition. Insanity and self-deprecation. Falling in love?

My 17th birthday wasn't so long ago, but 27 gets closer and closer and ten years is a long time.

So I'll call her mother today, affect an accent reminiscent of Baton Rouge, talk about the cats in the backyard, and remember the palm trees lining the streets of Houston, Texas.
Then I'll probably look at the photos of a tall woman whose name no longer exists. She's pretending to use a turned off personal computer terminal in some office somewhere, during the late '80's. She's wearing a blazer, and smiling awkwardly at the man presumably taking the photos. His name still exists, because that's how marriage and divorce works in the West, but I just call him "Dad."

I would never wear my hair like that, pulled back in a simple ponytail.