Please Stay

          “I love you.” The words had gingerly floated into my awaiting ear. I was infused with an exuberance I had not felt since the days when life was the playground, and my head was cradled in the crook of her arm. Still, I knew that these words came not from my birth mother, but from the twisted lips of Mnemosyne compounded in the mind of this already senile geriatric, where things were, at best, only fragments of the truth.

          Since the day I was born, my mouth never really left the confines of my mother’s tit. It wasn’t that I couldn’t understand the world and its concepts, just that Downs has a way of befuddling the mind: frequently transforming coherent sentences into jumbles of nothing. She finally gave up, of course, leaving me in the care of siblings, then the sympathetic uncles and aunts and finally, the safe haven for the mentally handicapped, the place I still call home.

          Even now, as she caresses my face with the hard scales that replaced the supple skin on her hands, I can’t help but hate her for turning away and leaving me with my bachelor brother at the tender age of twenty-three. I hate her. Yet, even as I try to keep a stoic appearance, I still feel the lingering curtain of yearning hanging over me; the yearning, for her once devoted affection.

          In a moment of weakness, I lay my head upon her chest, taking much comfort in the warmth of her body. Looking up, I gaze into her eyes, trying to find the sparkle that she once used to watch over me. I only find pain - layer after layer of pain, obscuring whatever sparkle that used to be.

          I get up, and, pushing away her reaching arms, kiss her forehead. I edge reluctantly away from her bed, but not before catching a glimpse of a familiar glint in her eye.

          “I love you,” it says, “please stay.”

          It’s too late. I cannot, I can only turn away and walk.