Trying to sleep as long as possible this morning, I turned my early alarm off and verified the “latest you can safely sleep and still get to work” alarm was set, and drifted back into a fitful sleep. I arrived home late to a townhouse I shared with my mom (gee, I wonder where I was thinking of townhouses…). The front door was wide open and the lights were on — at least in the front room. I grabbed for my knife with my right hand and my phone with my left hand and I called my mom from my “Favorites” menu (I still haven’t taken her number out of “Favorites”). I stepped in and immediately saw the hall closet had been ransacked – all the picture albums had been shoved down from the top shelf as someone clearly had been rifling through looking for valuables. I stepped over the pile of clothes and albums on the floor and into the house as my mom picked up. “Mom, we’ve been robbed!” I said, agitated. “It’s okay, honey,” she said in a voice immediately calming and I found a little irritating because, shit, we’d been robbed! She shouldn’t be so calm!

I went to look at the kitchen and found it relatively unscathed. And before I had a chance to go into the back rooms, mom was there.

I explained what I’d seen. She nodded and smiled. She led back to the back bedrooms which were dark.

“Mom, wait, let me go back and get my flashlight… and my knife,” I realized I wasn’t holding it anymore.

“It’s okay,” she said, still smiling. But it wasn’t alright because I didn’t have a flashlight or my knife and I didn’t know if whoever did this might still be here. She continued, unperturbed.

I remember we went into her room – which made sense because she would want to check on jewelry – and it was still dark. She didn’t turn on any lights. She barely put her hand on the night stand where she kept her jewelry and immediately said, “it’s fine.” She smiled to me. “It’s fine,”  and I could see it even in the dark.

I woke up. The realization my mom has been dead now for more than four years and that bittersweet feeling of getting to spend a moment longer with her – even if just a short period in a dream that in the light of day makes little sense – feels precious and yet pokes at the wound I thought more healed than it feels right now. And I’m crying as I type this and I don’t care because I’m trying desperately to cling to the the memory of her smile in that dream even as it evaporates like the fog rising from the river as the sun comes up. I miss you so much, mom.