Thyme Fog
The room is in a basement. A church, I think. The floor is hard. I know because that is where I sit. It is covered in industrial carpet. It is still, cool in summer. The walls are light blue. There is harsh fluorescent lighting beneath textured, plastic covers within a drop ceiling.
There are so many women here. Emotion collects as a palatable thyme fog. They talk quickly, staccato, hard and punctuated. I have no idea what they are talking about. Concepts and issues swell over and around me, set into motion by the cadence of voices. The floor is cool and hard, and the sound can not stop because there is nothing soft for it to go into. There are only hard walls and floor and lighting, and bodies too animated for rest. I know my mother must be near, the room is not that large, but she is engaged. What is happening is something more than me, more than where we are together.
She is twenty-seven or twenty-eight, and this is for her, and is hers. While this is not my time of being, I am there, too young to witness, but not too young to be aware. She is teaching me about the difference between words and actions, and that things can happen if you use the two together. She is learning this with me. This young woman that I am attached to is more than anything that any one person thinks her to be, and she will prove to herself that she is right.