“I love you, and I’m so sorry.”
5
I wake up with a start and immediately sit up. I press a palm to my chest as if the gesture will help my heart to slow down.
It wasn’t a dream.
I don’t know why I’ve never made the connection before, but my mother was there the night she died. She held me and told me she loved me. I hadn’t made it up. I try to breathe through the shock of the realization, but I feel like I’m floating haphazardly, and I don’t know how to get my feet back on the ground.
The night my parents died feels like it’s burned into the fabric of who I am. I’ve always replayed my gran telling me, the memory changing with time as I grew older and understood more and could look at it through a different lens than the one my five-year-old self saw everything through.
I’ve always thought of the dream as just that...a dream. I’ve even wondered if my mind made it up. One last moment with my mother that my psyche so desperately wanted that the want itself morphed into a confusing memory. But looking at it all now, knowing what I am and what they were, it changes everything about that night for me.
If I hadn’t left my own body to visit Zeph, if I hadn’t experienced it firsthand, I would easily still call it all a dream, but I know better. She was there that night. She could do what I can do. She said goodbye. So many different emotions fight to be let out, but I try to wade through them to make sense of all of this.
I think back through what I thought I knew about my childhood, and try to piece all these surfacing memories into my version of the past. I feel like I’m trying to put a puzzle together with a bunch of pieces I didn’t even know I was missing.
My mother and father met and learned that they were mates. It seems like all of that went down at a volatile time. If I had to guess, I would suspect all of this happened at the beginning of a Gryphon uprising, since it was my father who seemed to be unsafe, and my mother’s connection to him was what also put her in danger.
Somehow my gran, who wasn’t actually my blood relative, but my mother’s servant, figured out how to escape, and they all ended up in the world I grew up in. We were hiding. My parents and my gran thought it would be safer, but clearly that couldn’t have been the case, because we were still hiding.
I think back to my mother’s journal, and something suddenly hits me. The dates I saw in the first book that had my mother’s name. She was born in 1619, which is a fact that’s hard for me to wrap my mind around, but that’s not what’s puzzling me. It said to see the archived writings, which I now know was my mother’s journal. She writes about being pregnant, but the information in the tome states that the journal was discovered in 1927.
I was born in 1994.
So where is the baby that my mother was pregnant with in her journal? Because there’s no way that baby could be me. I assumed it was when I first read her diary, but now I don’t think that’s possible.
Did they lose the baby? Do I have a sibling out there somewhere? No, that can’t be right, why would they raise me and not that child? My parents may have been a lot of things, but they loved me. They wouldn’t have abandoned me for anything, and I don’t see them doing that to any child they had.
My mother’s face from my dream memory of the night she died surfaces in my mind. The way the moon lit up her face, and the shadows tried to hide the sadness in her eyes. I can’t even imagine what she went through in life. The running, the possible loss of a child, the struggle to keep me and our family safe, just to lose in the end.
Tears quietly drip down my face. I feel so sad for her. So sad for everything she had to face. She tried to tell me goodbye, to prepare me for her loss and leave me with words she hoped would comfort me in the future. I just didn’t realize that until now.
I swipe at my cheeks. I haven’t cried over my parents in over a decade at least. It was hard for me at first to understand and accept that I wouldn’t see them again. That there wouldn’t be any more hugs, kisses, and cuddles from my mommy. No more lessons, bear hugs, and wrestling with my dad. It was tough, but eventually life without them was all that I knew. I accepted it and had no choice but to move forward.
So it surprises me that right now, I feel something inside of me splinter, and all kinds of memories and sadness come seeping out of the cracks. I shove the blanket against my face and mourn. I grieve for all the times it would have been nice to have them. The times I needed the kind of affection and softness only a loving mother can give. Or the guidance and strength that my father always had at the ready. I feel the echo of my mother’s lips against my head. Hear her soothing voice as she tells me that she loves me and that she’s sorry. And that fractures me even more, because I’m old enough to now understand how heart-wrenching that must have been for her.
I sit in my anguish and watch the fire until it’s nothing but embers. I watch their red glow as
