The Hiding Place

When I was little I would crawl into my mom’s arms and press my face to her chest to feel the safety of her heartbeat. My legs would dangle over her lap as she chatted with a friend on the phone or sat at the kitchen table recounting the day to my dad over a cup of hot tea, her voice penetrating through my cheek into my skull. It was muffled and warbled through her skin, but so familiar, like it must have been when I was a miniature version of myself, stuffed inside her cozy womb, amidst a whooshing and bubbling world of darkness.

I loved her smell. Not the perfume, the harsh and intoxicating fragrances that always changed with her moods, but the subtle scent, like the one on her pillowcase in the morning. I breathed it in steadily while her hand unconsciously found its way to my hair and raked through the baby fine strands around my forehead sending tingles down my neck. Her lap was the best place in the world.

This afternoon when Charlie woke up from nap crying hysterically, I pulled him in tight and tucked his soft plum of a head under my chin. I shushed and hummed and bounced him around the living room. His squalls turned into sniffs that turned into silence as the last crocodile tear rolled down his cheek in lonely defeat. I kept him close anyway, relishing the warmth of his languorous body melded into mine. I let my fingers trace a path through his downy hair.

Will he remember this feeling? Way inside the inner chambers of his mind where all of the earliest memories are stored as feeble impressions, unreachable save for the day a smell or taste plunges in from the outside world and coaxes them forth as hazy bits of a dream? I hope so.

When I kiss the top of his head a smile emerges at the corners of his mouth. His eyes catch mine and for an instant they twinkle with the profundity of an old sage. I love you.