The eternality in our ephemerality

Chapter 31. The older the wiser....?

The tires screeched.

My head throbbed from the corner of the window up to the front and split my eyelids open: I had fallen asleep, as to be expected. My hands swiftly removed the saliva off my squished cheeks and opened the door to which my mother awaited me with a smile and an elevated arms, embraced me, and my clumsiness, as we entered the grand mahogany door. My father and Sylvie were both there once we arrived and my outfit, though little I cared, still had to be redeemed.

Once the door, held by a pale arm, swung open: I hurried to the cold body and captured my wiser self a hug and stared at those huge black eyes that filled themselves with pleasure.

The arms, fragile and frosty as mine, never left their sensitive touch; and though they were fragile, they held me tightly in an embrace that radiated warmth.

My mother, assured of her argument, was certain that my genes were highly influenced by my grandmother and the likelihood of it was beyond assurance: our physicality, both of us skin painted in white, having grand dark eyes, a lenient complexion that was decorated by a wide smile and a small nose. Our taste was also peculiarly similar: we both had a necessity for sugar and our tongues, that rarely got tempted to malice, were ruthless in their words and lastly, our souls could easily be taken advantage of.

We walked inside the pale house with my arm held by hers and my eyes admiring the large windows and simplicity: paintings, made by her, that decorated the white walls, a turquoise spiral staircase that was grazed by a ceiling window and the neutral tonalities of the furniture and cushions; nothing ostentatious, everything simple. The paintings that, if I am brutally honest, hung proudly on the sides of the bare wall were the only fragments of joy that escaped from the blandness of it and the solemnity of the big house only habited by two hearts.

My grandfather is of the same translucent complexion: both white as snow, and sweet as honey. Green-eyed, bushy-eyebrowed and a smile as pale as his skin.He had, as always, his tie tied in a windsor knot, his pocket watch, and a book in his hand, were within it his glasses were. The garden he took such care in was always where we dined and after some of us read a book, my sister and my father fled and were rescued by Netflix.

As an appetiser, me and my companion sneaked into the kitchen where we ate a chocolate and headed outside, but before I did, I headed upstairs into what once was my mothers room and admired every photo, of every moment she ever considered worthy of being eternally frozen in time. My mother's smile, curved with a bulk, had never seemed to change: it glowed like any other day and never seemed to have the slightest bit of change, as she did, it forced a smile upon my lips.

As if I were a stranger, my eyes toured the room: recognizing and praising every perfume fragrance or memory that flashed before my eyes. In one dash, I encountered one photo where I was in her arms as a baby, then as a toddler, as a small girl and last year on my sixteenth birthday. The pictures kept flashing under my scope, the memories, like kaleidoscopes, twisted and changed, hovered and tweeted from memory to another. Breathe to wink and wink to a flash. Time wasn't involved at all, from being a baby with apparatus clinging to my waist, up to a toddler jumping under Disney world, pigtails and a belle gown grasping over the blue zafiran castle peacocking in the background. Twitching the branches of my life where the leaves of memories were quickly rooting from below and attempting to reach above: up and up going to reach the sky. A common signature remained on each of them, my own signature to each of the everlasting moments frozen by time; in all the pictures, my smile was seen, shining and white always caressing my corners upwards with my lip tips pointing up to the airspace; some pictures I was even toothless, but not even the lack of teeth denied my smile to shine. There was one however, one picture that caused my leashed curiosity to break free and reveal the hidden questions under my eyebrows' furrow. The photo where my brown eyes doubled their size and my lips wrestled amongst each other.