sleeping mask

In her tiny apartment my mother has three wind-up clocks and all of them are wrong.

The calendar page is stalled at April.  And for the duration of my visit home, the weather is uniformly silver with soft rain. There is no diurnal sense of time passing.

I begin to doubt my own watch, as if somewhere on the three hour bus ride and two tedious ferries I have crossed some uncharted dateline.

At night I wear a sleeping mask, a beautiful invention. There’s a hospital nearby and the mask blocks out the orangeade tint of the parking lot lights. The mask is blue and has yellow moons on it. It’s from the drugstore. There was this one and another one that said “Not now, I have a headache.”

“Well, look at you, Zsa Zsa Gabor!” my mother exclaims at one point. From under the mask I frown in her general direction. It’s midnight at least and she’s reading Sherlock Holmes. She’s got up to make herself some toast. She asks me if I want some. I pretend to be sleeping. Eventually she settles down.

I can hear the sound of the three clocks ticking. If I pay to close attention to the ticking, it seems to grow louder and louder, it becomes the susurration of insects in the jungle. Or a bomb.

Trying to ignore the ticking, in the absence of all other stimulus, is hard. Feeling like I’m sliding closer to a dangerous edge, eventually I fall asleep…