Oh, Mother

I spent more than half a year without my mom.
It's been half a year since the last time I spoke to her, saw her, hugged her, touched her.
I still unconsciously expect a text from her to come anytime now.
I wait.

I think she's going to pop up in my room, or show up unexpectedly to my front door. She did that in 2014, flying across the globe from the U.S. to surprise me at my home in Seoul, Korea after she found out I had been sick for a few days. Who would cook me food and hug me, she thought.

When there is life, there is also death.  
I know. 
But when it comes without warning, without giving you time to count to ten, or to rub your eyes to wake up, then you feel like you have been hit in the face with a brick. 

It’s like the traffic signal went suddenly from green to red.
You feel dizzy as if you can actually feel the earth spinning right under you.

My life in the past six months looks like a blur.
I don't really know what went on and how I lived from April to October.
I stopped working. 
And then I went back to working.
I lost some weight. But somehow gained it back.
I had a birthday.
My brother got married.

I am learning how to smile and laugh again, without having my face muscles feel so awkward by the outward expressions of joy.

Everything has changed.
And yet, everything is the same.

The sun still rises in the morning, and it sets every evening.
Except now, the setting sun that used to give me all the warm fuzzies inside overwhelms me with pain and sorrow. 
The once purple and red orange hues that triggered an awe of the One above, and a sigh of relief for the day’s end, now upsets me.
I sit in the metro on my commute home with my eyes glazed in tears, as I look out the window and let the sunset hues touch my face.
Sometimes the tear drops fall heavy without warning.

Saying that I miss my mom is an understatement.
There are still days when I wake up and think whatever had happened six months ago was all a bad dream. Just a nightmare, I think.

But soon enough, like a splash of cold water chucked at my face, my new reality sinks in.
She's no longer here.
I can no longer hear her laugh, hear her insights on the most random things of life.
Or ask her pertinent life questions that I never got to ask before—

She was obsessed with her family— me, my brothers and my dad.
She had quirky tendencies and her thoughts in a day were just as diverse as her appetite for food and news.
The apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree.

No longer can I get her warm, motherly tight embrace, which had melted every negative in my life away.
I could probably use that today—and for the next days of my entire life!