Summer Sestina

Dancing with my mother in the living room are steps different to the ones I’d danced earlier that same day. Holding her close I sway to an exhausted beat. We live two different summers and embrace different colours but not as tight as she embraces me at dusk, cradling me so I can relive winter instead.

We giggle in hollow waves and grip each other’s backs instead of crying, knowing that tomorrow we’ll make room for our own separate summer’s to again collide at dusk. Her hair is drier than usual so I know she’s been out during the day . I don’t ask why, her hair shaking with her tremors, a different colour, hue, shade of brown for each strand waving to our defeated beat.

The routine is the same, we make eye contact for a beat and detach ourselves to go to our rooms instead. We take the moment to cover our colours so they match the ivory walls of our living room, neutral and reminiscent of every winter day spent huddled together; when it’s always dusk.

My body is shaking with a draining plea to pass on dusk to tomorrow, listen to my brain’s pulse, my rib’s ache and my heart’s beat and continue on with my freshly picked summer’s day. But I know my mother will push through as I should, so instead I grip my cheeks with one hand to milk a smile and betray my room with the other, twisting the handle as tight as my face, colours

depleting around me as I trade in my summer colours for my winter neutrals. My eyes melt to take in our dusk - my mother in an urban sprawl on the living room floor, a simple, sanded oak yet to develop a sundried beat. There’s space for me here with a comfortable safety instead of my earlier comfort, where my colours shone in the day

with an incessant hum of rejection on a day filled with kindred colours . My mother has a different hum, instead it consumes my own and holds me at dusk. Now we don’t grip each other, we cry to the beat of the ivory walls in the living room.

Waking red-eyed to the next day, we shun the burn of dusk to swap our colours for those of our separate summer beat, instead of the winter covering our expired living room.