#soap musing

Intuition, the handwriting - something should have tipped you off, surely? It's been years, but you know better than to slack like this. Knew the consequences well: your address scrawled neatly on an envelope in your mail box, your parents' signature holiday 'care of' sticker tucked carefully into the sender's corner. You'd smiled when you'd found it, a welcome reprieve among the stack of bills growing more and more urgent. You'd been moving a lot these last few years, leases left unrenewed as you flit around the country, and your savings have dwindled because of it. 

You hadn't grown lax, really, but you'd missed your mother very much and it had been years since you'd seen her for her birthday - surely it had been long enough? He couldn't still be keeping tabs -?

Belated, instinct finally starts to kick in when you see the gaudy cover of the card, takes shape in too much glitter tickling your skin as it falls to the floor. If your mother is a devout believer in anything, it is only in the generic blend of nondenomination holiday iconography and the effectiveness of a personalized photo postcard, but what greets you now can only be described as overwhelmingly Christian. White and gold and angelic, a verse you don't bother to read fully preaching something about a holy infant. You know it well enough anyway, heard it all before. The reason for the season, he'd harp at you, pulling you along to mass each year just to sandwich you between his own bulky body and his judgemental mother's sharp elbow. 

Compromise, you'd called it. Important to him, and so, important to you. You'd sit in that pew for hours, inspecting the depictions of the stations you only vaguely knew the story of, and wonder if he would eventually drag you along to your wedding much the same way, piercing blue eyes pinning you in place as a wrinkled hand fed you stale wafers. 

Compromise. The backbone of every great relationship.

Your hands shake as you open the card, enough to knock the photograph tucked within loose. It lands with a dull thud, the edge of it slicing through the air before falling, face up onto the counter. It's pixelated, zoomed in well past the capabilities of the average phone camera. There was equipment behind this. You don't know why that's what you note first, but you do - before the glare of a window in the foreground, a street light shining on back-lit windows; before the actions of the subject, lighting candles at a well-dressed table, heaping with savory dishes and drinks you can still taste, fresh in your memory. Before even subject yourself, a soft smile tugging at your lips as you take great care to ensure everything looks just so for your mother's birthday dinner. Candid, taken from the street outside, and flaunted here now to twist that moment of safety and happiness. Control it and contort it, reframe it through his lens. He was back from deployment, it seemed. You knew better.

Tears splot the ink of his messy note as you read it, sobs you hadn't realized were building distorting the words as you read them aloud: