Falling Apples

I’d like to go back to bed this morning.

Curl up under the layers of down

and cotton and rest my head

on my aging pillow,

the one that’s got nothing left inside,

the one that I still reach for anyway.

But there are songs to write,

and scripts to begin,

and a poetry book I have been threatening

to compile for years now.

Still, the white-sheeted bed calls to me,

if only for a minute.

But I can’t get in it,

because if I did get in it,

I would be like my mother.

My mother’s in bed right now,

sleeping her life away.

And I don’t want to be like my mother.

Even though I seem to be becoming more like her

every day.

My hands are starting to wrinkle like hers.

And my skin is becoming thin like hers.

It cracks in winter, like hers.

But it’s not just my exterior taking on her attributes,

there are things on the inside too,

things that I swear

do not belong to me -

The occasional racial slur,

or judgmental barb,

the kind that I would have barked at her for saying years ago

are now, suddenly, coming out of my mouth.

Besides her dermatological and verbal issues,

I seem to have inherited her depression,

her stomach’s inability to seemingly digest anything,

and her need for reading glasses after reaching a certain advanced age.

But most terrifying of all,

I seem to have developed her penchant for falling.

I’d been in bed for the day sick with a weird stomach flu,

asleep for several hours in the afternoon,

and woke up just in time to catch the evening news.

I stumbled out of bed, disoriented and hungry.

At the last second,

I chose the bathroom over the kitchen,

and stepped on a plastic door stop left on the floor.

My ankle turned beneath me, snapping like a piece of celery, 

and sent the rest of me twisting forward.

Hands out, wrists bruised,

left knee smacking the ground.

In a second,

it was over.

I sat up in complete darkness,

unsure what had just happened.

All I could think about was how much I felt like my mother in that moment.

How much I was turning in to her.

I was having the kind of day she would be having,

and it didn’t matter how much exercise and good eating I have been doing,

or how many vitamins I have swallowed,

or how much meditation I have sat for,

or how many yoga classes I have attended.

I was turning into her.

And there was nothing I could do about it.

Later that night,

as I lay in bed icing my ankle,

I called my mother.

She too, had been in bed with a stomach flu all day.

But she hadn’t fallen,  

at least,  not yet.