At last real winter has come. I sat at Starbucks last week looking at the freezing people outside running away from the heavy snow which whitened the city a few hours later. Next to the window, I sat sipping my café latte, cradling the warmth in my hands and welcoming the heat in my stomach.
A woman in her fifties passed by and gave me a motherly look, a look that chilled my entire body. She might saw her son in me as I saw my mother in her. Her brown eyes were saying a lot of things. I knew it was a moment when she looked but I felt it longer. I knew she missed her son as I missed my mother.
I sent my mother a text message to see if she was awake. It was about midnight in
As I took another sip from my extremely hot latte, my cell phone rang. It was her. My heart jumped and was about to come out of my body out of happiness. I wanted to throw myself inside the phone and meet her from the other end. I wanted to kiss her and hug her and tell her how much I miss her and miss my father.
She sounded different. I grew worried. “What’s going on?” I asked her. “Nothing,” she replied. I begged her to tell me and she did. She told me she didn’t want to say it because she doesn’t want to make me worry a lot.
She was washing the dishes when she heard gunfire. She didn’t move at first. Gunfire, so what? What’s new in that? Then she said she saw people running back and forth in the street. That’s when she got my message and decided to go to another room where there was no huge window to be broken.
The words were chocked in my throat. I felt I needed a crane to pull them out. I felt mute. Then I decided to bury the words I wanted to say inside my heart. How could I tell her about the snow by the time the sky there was snowing bombs and bullets?
