…with my mum

I was on the roof, watching the sunset. It was a late summer evening, at the end of a hot summer day. We just had a fight and I felt the house was suffocating me. I left it and, without anywhere to go, I turned to the roof, climbed the few steps to it and opened the heavy metal door. I sat there, just above the room where we were fighting earlier. The room where your words were floating through my silence. The room where every breath I was taking was, instead of filling my lungs, shrinking them, drying them out. So I had to leave. 

I left you there, waiting to hear me say more than ‘thank you’. I didn’t know what else to say. You came home and the first thing you did, after you put your bag away, was to come into my room to see the laptop. It was still in the box, I didn’t open it. You asked me if I looked at it and I said yes, you asked me if I liked it and I just shrugged. You told me I didn’t understand what it meant for you to do this. I did, but the words were just clumsily pushing each other around and none was coming out. I couldn’t tell you what you wanted to hear. I just looked at you and hoped you saw it. You didn’t, so you went on. You told me I was ungrateful and that maybe it would have been better if you didn’t get me a laptop, that I would have understood what hard work really was. You asked me, almost begged me, to say I was grateful. And I was. I understood. But the words were simply not coming out. So I had to leave.

On the roof, the heat that was all day trapped in the asphalt was rising. It was filling the space between the sky and all the buildings, the space around me, and only a few gusts of wind were carrying the air I was so thirsty for. I was gazing somewhere past where the city meets the skyline, almost through the sun, when I felt you sitting next to me. I thought you were going to ask me again to say that I appreciated your efforts. That I saw what it meant for you. But you didn’t. You didn’t say anything.

In another world, you would have said that you came to the roof because you didn’t know why I went there. Because that was your escape plan, but not a temporary one. Because you knew that the moment you opened that door, you were not going to close it. And you thought I was going to do the same. I would have told you that I thought about it many times. That I tried to visualise how it would happen, but my mind wouldn’t allow me. I would have told you that my mind wasn’t stopping me from visualising only bad things, but also the good ones. I would have told you how when I wasn’t able to get something out of my mind, I was always putting it in words in a note on my phone. You would have asked me how I always seem able to write, but so incapable of communicating. I would have told you that it wasn’t always the words that I was lacking, it was the voice. You would have told me that you always seemed to have the voice, but almost never the right words. I would have nodded. I would have asked if there was anything you always wanted to say, but couldn’t. You would have apologised. You would have told me that sometimes you were selfish. You would have said that sometimes you didn’t think past the moment you were in, and that other times you were drowning in future worries. I would reply not with words, but with a squeeze of your hand. You would have continued, you would have told me that sometimes you wished that you could turn back time, that you would do some things differently. I would have asked which ones and you would have told me. We would have stayed there long past the sun was gone, long past the heat turned into a gentle breeze.

Instead, we sat in silence. And when it got dark, you said we should go in. I got up and I extended a hand to you, and on the way up I pulled you in for a hug. We cried, because we both knew that even if no words were said, a whole conversation unfolded between us.