My mother is boarding a plane tonight and flying to Egypt.

I am sitting here, after telling her I love you and hanging up the phone, imagining some terrorist hijacking, some catastrophic loss.

I am then picking up the Annie Dillard book I began to read last night and finishing a chapter on lunar eclipses.

My yoga teacher says the lunar phases effect everything. I buy this completely.

Sometimes, when the sky is empty, I begin to worry irrationally about unrelated things. I do this before I realize it’s been days since I last saw the moon. The wait for her return is an anxious one; her reappearance is like a sigh.

The other day, driving in the rain and talking to my mom on the phone after she chided me for multitasking but listened anyways while I complained about my father and worried about my dog, I saw a rainbow.

The rainbow was one arc of six colors stretched in a fluid stroke across the sky. I was heading south on a road that parallels the Six Flags amusement park and pulled off and up a hilly side street to get a better look, still talking on the phone. The rainbow’s colors clashed with the skeletal shapes that two monstrous coasters cast before it. As I watched, clouds shifted and the colors seemed to brighten, then fade.

In the months since my mother’s surgery, since her recovery, I have moved. I have settled myself, one dog, one horse, one carful of stuff, into a whitewashed apartment now draped in pink curtains and white Christmas lights. I have missed her and then, I have watched with amazement my own reintegration into life. I have done this with balance. I have not stayed out all night and done drugs and thrown hands to the air in an effort to forget. I have not chosen unpleasant or unkind company to keep.

And sometimes, because of this, I can almost forget.

Forget that when the surgeon closed and came to find me, the last one waiting in an empty white room, he said, They will come back and I nodded and thought, Accept this, Allie and thought, Except…

Forget that I did everything I could for her that summer, passed each day with balled up fists, ready to fight.

And still she says to me Metastasis this morning on the phone. Says so after so many months, so many unfair fights.

So we hang up and I go to workshop where I admonish my friend for bad grammar and press my forefingers into my sternum because there’s all this buzzing there, just beneath the skin.

And for some reason I start thinking about last summer, when she wanted to see the Grand Canyon and I wanted to press ahead; so I whined about the tourist trap motel, the lines, the ticket prices, and she relented and we pressed on and I’m sorry for it.

There’s a Hawiaan meditation called Ho O Pono Pono in which you close your eyes and imagine someone, anyone, and say to them I’m sorry, please forgive me, I love you, thank you.

I do this most nights during yoga: picture her in bed with her glasses on and the dog beside her and her bony knees propped up beneath a book.

I leave my teaching practicum early tonight to make it to restorative yoga where I lie on my belly across a bolster pillow and cry when the teacher puts her hands on my back to deepen the stretch.

I try to envision purple healing light, I try to Ho O Pono Pono, but the words don’t stick.

*

The library at this school isn’t quiet. Having traveled here from a University with twenty floors of reference books and endless stacks, silent as Spanish catacombs, as snow swept fields, I am unsettled by this fact. All I can hear is the twittering of some dancer’s laugh, the recitation of some actor’s lines and all I want is silence. Space to sit with the words she left spread across my mind.

It’s in these moments I worry that I’m growing old in hyper drive. I am twenty three and can go years without lovers. I can balance my books and care for my animals and buy health insurance and plan ahead. I can nurse my dying mother.

I can stay the hands that move to delete that last sentence and think perhaps my youth is evidenced only by the preservation of eternal hope that it’s not true.

*

In Egypt my mother will see pyramids and temples. She will limp - because she does not walk well -down side streets and through bazaars in one hundred degree heat. She will, she told me tonight before her flight, take her tumors on a boat ride down the Nile. I laugh and then say for the fifteenth time, Are you sure you should be doing this?

I need to, she replies.

I was thinking about her body yesterday. About the way its shrunken down to a series of toothpicks pieced together. To look that way feels absolutely the same as wholeness does but appears oppositional to everybody else.

To me she seems perched on the verge of evaporation. I cannot imagine losing her because my body cannot hold that kind of hurt. I feel its shadow though. It’s that buzzing, that sternum ache.

*

Tonight after yoga, after library, after her plane has taken off, I cross the empty parking lot. It’s uncharacteristically cold and I see my breath in faint puffs before my face. I walk faster, press my keys and the car beeps at me from its spot across the pavement. I see her then, the moon strung up wide and yellow in the sky like a dirt stained softball. The clouds shift and her light seems to brighten, then fade.