My Cup Runneth Over

Oftentimes, now in photos or when I catch my reflection, I see you in the shape of my body. In the look on my face, the cloth draped around my being, the angle my shoulders tilt towards the camera, the sleep in my eye.

I see you, and your mother, your sisters, and my heart floods.

I hear you, in the roaring cackle of my laugh, the gasps and honks between sucking in air before continuing to flail from laughter, unable to breathe, oceans of release pooling in my eyes.

In the tone of my comedic voices, in the soft-rock on the radio and the click of a kettle set to boil.

I feel your presence in the way I tidy up and the abundance of food I cook for two, the walls my hands brush and grip as I climb over dogs that shadow my every move. The guttural sounds when they step exactly where I plan to, a tangle of legs and limbs in a narrow space.

I see your imprint in the lines forming around my mouth and smile, for they came from only you. I see the same carvings, the channels of joy, spreading across the faces of my brother and sister, and when they catch in the light, I could scream with wonder.

To be marked so permanently by those who love us and to wear that badge of honour so proudly.

Your skin, always shades darker than my own, olive and glowing, deepens in the summer sun. Pale alongside you, I carry the same freckled nature, witnessing them stretch into constellations space and time could never fully reach. God could never understand, let alone you or I.

The clench in my shoulders and the shot of adrenaline when I worry is the same pulsating thread you’ve carried, transmitted through held hands and umbilical cords that, despite being cut, can never be severed.

The hot tears of self-doubt, of shame, flow from your rivers into my own. Cascading violently, quietly, consistently through time and moments we’ll never see.

I contemplate the soil you were fertilised in, and ache for the garden that grew. Bountiful, tended, seeds harvested to be resown despite the ugly thorns that thicken with each generation.

I heave at the roots that anchor far below a surface I can’t begin to fathom. Sometimes they loosen and come free; other times they break to be re-pulled in chapters of purging to come.

In moments unknown to you, I see my Grandma, and I thank her for her beauty. For whilst you carry the agony of that life, one I’ll never fully know, you carry the love born of it too. You carry the best aspects of a woman who couldn’t have done better if she tried.

And when you sit by the window with your legs crossed, or shuffle around the fire-lit house tending to everyone else, I feel her alive, finally, fully in her joy.

Of all the saplings, I am one you sheltered.

One you harboured in the nerve endings of your fingertips, in the play of your nature, the fierceness of your strength. The good, the bad, the ugly, ferociously embedded into the woman I have become, yet I am so much more.

I am the addition of all the things you hoped to be, and one day my child will be the same, and their child, and theirs.

With the extra inch added to my femur, to the width of my hips and shoulders, ever slightly broader, is a chin held higher for the long line of mothers whose cup went without so mine could runneth over.

Voiceless backbones of the universe, silent matriarchs whom, without, I would never be.