Beach Balls
Sitting alone on her patio, Debbie vacantly looks across the water of her pool searching for something out of place, something that needs to be picked up, sanitized, replaced. The beach balls toss and turn on small waves of chorine. Never once played with, these toys exist to signify a past once lost, never to be regained. The actual beach balls her children played with have popped, mildewing in a landfill somewhere far from this pristinely manufactured pool of fiberglass. These bobbing beach balls are seasonally exchanged, traded in four times a year for newer, less bleached and sun faded replacements found at the local Walmart.
Her nest is empty. Three children have grown and left her. The husband is away, always on one business trip or another. During the day, Debbie goes to work. And comes home. Although her home is always as immaculate as a Martha Stewart advertisement and as sterile as a hospital, Debbie cleans. After years of picking up after her two sons and her daughter, cleaning has become a habit now turned compulsion. While everything else has slowly come to a halt in her life, she can’t stop moving onward to a purposeless nowhere.
Christmas carols float from the house onto the patio. The holidays are coming. The kids are coming home, but not to stay. Such a time should bring joy. Instead, negativity pervades her thoughts, churning with a ferocious paranoia that only a restless mother could bear to harbor.
When will they come home? Will they try to stay away as long as possible like last year? What about that stupid girlfriend? Everything was better before she came along. Family time was family time. A son was still a son. Now, everything has fallen apart and drifted away.
She meditates on the beach ball, now realizing that she and it are all too similar. Both have been set adrift, scattered, only be cheaply replaced, left to mildew and rot in deflated loneliness.
Christmas will never be the same.
Her nest is empty. Three children have grown and left her. The husband is away, always on one business trip or another. During the day, Debbie goes to work. And comes home. Although her home is always as immaculate as a Martha Stewart advertisement and as sterile as a hospital, Debbie cleans. After years of picking up after her two sons and her daughter, cleaning has become a habit now turned compulsion. While everything else has slowly come to a halt in her life, she can’t stop moving onward to a purposeless nowhere.
Christmas carols float from the house onto the patio. The holidays are coming. The kids are coming home, but not to stay. Such a time should bring joy. Instead, negativity pervades her thoughts, churning with a ferocious paranoia that only a restless mother could bear to harbor.
When will they come home? Will they try to stay away as long as possible like last year? What about that stupid girlfriend? Everything was better before she came along. Family time was family time. A son was still a son. Now, everything has fallen apart and drifted away.
She meditates on the beach ball, now realizing that she and it are all too similar. Both have been set adrift, scattered, only be cheaply replaced, left to mildew and rot in deflated loneliness.
Christmas will never be the same.