I saw a paper airplane caught in the branches of a tree and thought of my mother, who taught me how to fold that kind of plane, with its sharp creases— as an act of care or frustration, depending on the day. Each fold was a lesson imbued with the weight of her unspoken hopes.
We fought when I was twelve after she battered me with disappointment and intolerance for who I had become.
Our distance was like the sky that paper airplane hoped to soar through.
A younger version of me, unruly and bitter, never listened to her scorched expectations, believing instead that my own path was the only one that mattered.
Yet before all of everything, she told me how much she loved me and would never think otherwise, her words a balm for a restless spirit.
I didn’t cry the morning she left, though the weight of silence enveloped me.
My memory under the tree was not a melancholy burn; it was a snapshot of laughter mingling with a tear. My memory, a forgotten moment, as so many things about us are forgotten.