Walking the Fine Line

the art of Seraphine de Senlis

Up the gray stairs, 

chipped and drab, 

I smell the smell of Institution.

At the nurses' station, 

they size me up and find me lacking:

a mother whose son has fallen apart-

(what has she done

to fail him?)

Down the hall to his bare, gray room......

His head emerges from the bedclothes.

We hug. He is trembling.

He smiles at me:

his same big smile, 

he looks at me,

his same blue eyes.

I am relieved.

This is still my son.

I will tether him to earth

with all of my mother's love.

I will never let go.

He has walked the fine line

between daybreak and hell-fire,

and has fallen.

Where will his beauty find a place to land

in halls so bleak and bare?

How will his life go on,

his hours measured out in hospital trays 

and paper pill cups?

We talk.

"I want them to make it stop:

this bad trip that never ends."

I tell him I am proud of him

for going for help.

I look at the faces, the eyes, of the other people

in these rooms, these hallways,

whose common denominator

is pain.

One of them chases the doctor - coat-tails flying - 

down the hallway, entreating

"Please, Doctor, Please!" 

to his retreating, harried back.

Looking out at the gray rain 

trickling down the speckled windows,

I recognize what a fine, thin line exists

between coping

and suffering that is too great 

for the mind to endure,

how, at any moment, 

under enough pain and provocation, 

any one of us 

might find ourselves here,

in this place of desolation, pain 

and no more hope.

He goes back to bed.

Living is too tiring right now.

On his bedside table, I see a little note

he has written in his spikey script:

"I am Cloud. 

Someone blow me away."

My heart stops, then begins again.

I go back along the gray corridor 

full of shuffling, suffering souls,

down the drab, chipped stairs,

out the heavy doors into the light of what is

- for others - an ordinary day.

Behind me, up two flights,

my son is sleeping.

Beside him sits a little

note to the world

he finds so painful.

I think upon those words,

with all of a mother's love, and pain, and fear:

"I am Cloud.

Someone blow me away."

For Shay's prompt at Real Toads: write about the "fine line" (as described at Real Toads), a topic with which I have had some experience.