7:53

7:53 My mother has creases under her eyes I’ve forgotten I contributed to, laugh lines around her lips I didn’t realize were from jokes I’d made. Her hair is darker now, her eyes a little smaller, and where the skin once was smooth, veins make little tracks, traipsing up and down her arms and legs with typographic detail. 

I used to be less in awe of her. When you’re fifteen and sixteen, your mother is ‘Mom,’ the woman who made and fed and raised you. Seventeen, she’s a friend, sure, and you can speak openly, even brazenly, but the lines remain firm. But now, I cannot remember the last time she spoke to me as if I did not have something to offer in return, foresight of my own to give in exchange for the presence I provide. 

I love her smile crinkles, her laugh lines, the river of veins on her calves and wrists. I don’t recognize them from my youth because I had not yet had enough time to put them there. I love the little hairs that stick out of her ponytail because the layers her hairdresser gave her made them too short. I love her aching hips, and her strong laborers hands. I love how she stands in the meadow, far enough away that all I can see is her silhouette, ant-like against the enormity of our ranch’s grasslands.

I am eighteen, and I sit alone at the table in our dining room, but she is only ten feet away in our kitchen, and I love her with all of the empty spaces we both have not yet taken up, and all of them that she has already filled within me with the love that I am so fortunate to try my own best to spread.

I loved her, I love her, I will love her always.

-Infinite