Dreaming, to discover the actual waking season
replicated in his dream, Brother Skunk enters the now once-removed familiarity
of his recently-vacated adolescent bedroom, a scentless and antiseptic box
emptied of his every trace, its only smell the fresh autumnal cold, summer’s
end signalled by a chill still holding to the hour.
He is entirely unsurprised to find his mother arched upon her back in agony
across the window’s open frame, eyes stretched yearning onto nothing, and in
them brutally visible her inability to understand either where she was or why,
her body neither bucking nor writhing in attempt to extricate itself from such
dilemma, but rather frozen in its taut inertia, a spring wound into that stasis
past which it could no further wind, yet holding tight in its leashed coil the
total energy expended to arrive at this endpoint, and to sustain such
unsustainable balance her limbs vibrating so fast their movement appears
imperceptible, supernatural.
He watches on, uncomprehending, clinical almost in his passivity until thrown
out into consciousness, pyjamas damp with a cold sweat, and awake now in the
less familiar room of these his first few college weeks, where the variety of
fresh experience has facilitated his wish to forget she ever was. (In this he
has been assisted to some degree by their sparse and irregular communication;
his shared flat having no telephone places him beyond reach of interruption,
perversely content at her reliance on his contacting her from a nearby callbox,
unaware as he remains that her sole conscious function these years had been to
carry him this far and set him down, for him to then carry his own sense
of peril on into the unmapped unknown, his ignorance alongwith, and an
inability to care for himself from which she knows it will take him years to
mature.)
Skunk crawls on out from his dream, on yet ever tethered to that distended
chrysalis of a past from which he so keenly wished to emerge as sourceless, or
damn near, on through this his first real opportunity to distance himself from
the restrictive embarrassment of that narrative appointed him; and too all the
new student body concomitant: their every individual existence to begin again
on this their next first day, sui generis, believing their parents to
exert little, if indeed even any, measure of influence on their determination
of presented self, and his own mother too likewise equally unmentionable, so
that later his classmates will in opposition define themselves with a willed
ambivalence when he is forced to abandon his studies on her account, when
trapped as she finds herself between two worlds, she will in attempt to somehow
navigate both simply break, enduring to her last breath that desperate limbo in
which his leaving had finally left her.
