Pacifier

🌼Van🌿

It was early morning, 5am. I remember watching the sunrise following us, playing hide and seek through the trees as the car drove slowly down a winding country road which sloped and dipped and curved and gave you the impression you were tunnelling underground.

I remember how I felt every bump, every pothole. How the car would shake as it rolled over another dip in the road, how it would shake as though it were about to fall apart.

And me and my brother Jamie shook too. We were strapped in with seat belts, Jamie was sleeping, his body limp like a rag doll. When the car rattled he rattled too and his head knocked against the window.

But I couldn't sleep.

Dad had woken us an hour ago, told us to get up, mum had rushed us to get dressed, mothered us the way she always did. Crouched down to help zip our jeans, fix the collars on our polo tops.

We had turned nine years old two days before but we hadn't had a party yet and having been woken so early, the only explanation the grin on our dads face when he told us we ought to be excited, I was suspicious of this strange beginning.

I remember we were driving for an hour and a half, the sunrise a slow, burning August orange. I remember stubbornly glaring into the rays, thinking I was proving how man I was when it stung and blinded me and I refused to shut my eyes.

I remember how we followed the roads out of the city and into the countryside, the unkempt country lanes twisting down steep hills only to rise through the woodland once again minutes later.

And I remember when the car stopped mum opened the door to help me jump down from the back seat. I remember we were both so small, but Jamie was slightly smaller.

It was cool despite the sunlight but the morning threatened to heat up and when our mum tried to zip my hoodie up dad laughed at her. Told her not to bother.

"Those lads are about to work up a sweat, don't bother..."

"They might be getting older but they're still my boys..." shed argued back, a nervousness about her as she zipped Jamie's jacket too and patted his shoulders down.

She looked between us with a quiet sort of madness, an intensity in the love she held for us. But i was used to my mother's strange disposition. The cold, the fragility lingering in her eyes.

Every action, even the most mundane. I remember they were all the same. Desperate.

Our mum was a tragic woman, slightly separate. She didn't often leave the house and the sunlight which graced her face that morning seemed foreign and wrong on her slate grey skin.

And she tucked us away, each under one arm, and we walked in time with her. I remember the feeling of her hip popping, digging into my shoulder with each step we took in sync.

And I remember my father laughing at that too.

He lead the way, turning over his shoulder only to critique how close she held us.

"Theyre not boys anymore love, they're young men and they don't need their mother smothering em all the time..."

But she hadn't believed him and that morning, just as every morning she had held onto us until the last moment. Only letting us go when it was absolutely necessary.

Now I knelt at little Isabelles feet, holding onto her with my face buried in her lap, holding onto her, knowing that I'd never be able to let go of her again. Even if I had to, even if there was no other choice. I held onto her, suspended in a moment of weakness, and in that moment of weakness I allowed myself a second to pretend that I would never let go of her again. That I would be forever able to hold onto her.