Pangs of What Exactly?

There is something in the mood, the air, the taste in my mouth that brings the past back to me, noticing images and faces and rooms long forgotten. The presence of a room,
the feeling of a moment, the sameness of emotions smothering me again.

A birdsong outside moves me back there – a chill through my bones, the brightness of the room where I sit writing, the sound of far off cars, airplanes landing, the breeze in the trees. The staleness of it all, the repetition of it.

Me? Perhaps it is me… reliving it again, the same emotion, unsettled, unarmored, unsure. Drinking black, bitter coffee, escaping for moments in sleep, twenty minutes at a time, captured by the past, awakened to now, to the hum of the abode, the rhythm of life, the drumbeat of my scribbling pencil, reliving, and rehashing, revealing regret. The sameness of the past.

Now, small footsteps on the stairs.

“Mommy?”

No, not the same at all. No regrets. Much, much better.