Samantha Duan
The bus smells like diesel and someone’s cold coffee.
Greece slides past the window in pieces. A gas station, lit white. A stretch of dark I can’t name. Then nothing, just the black glass throwing my own face back at me. The engine hums low enough to feel in my teeth. Around me, strangers sleep the way you only sleep on buses, chins folded down, mouths open, trusting the dark.
I’ve got a plan in my bag. A folded map, a phone at forty percent, and a promise to myself: pizza and a bottle of cheap red on the balcony when we arrive. Feet up. The sea somewhere below, unseen. That’s the whole reward. I’ve been saving it in my head for hours.
Then the phone buzzes.
I know before I look. My mother. A voicemail, because she never texts what she can say out loud.
My thumb hovers. I know this script by heart. She’ll ask what I’m doing with my life. She’ll remind me that travel is a luxury I keep mistaking for a plan. There’ll be a sigh in there somewhere, the one that carries more than any sentence. I decide to listen now, on the bus, so it doesn’t ruin the balcony. Better to take the hit in the dark, alone, than let it sour the wine.
I press play.
“It’s me. I know you’re busy.”
A pause. Kitchen sounds behind her. Something simmering.
“I’m making the dumpling soup. Your one. I’ll freeze some, okay? For when you come home.”
I swallow hard.
“I just missed you today. That’s all.” Then, quieter, like she didn’t mean to say it out loud: “You’re my best achievement, you know. I’m proud. Enjoy Greece. Enjoy it for real.”
That’s it. Forty seconds. No sigh. No sermon.
I sit very still.
Here is the thing I don’t say to anyone. I love my mother so much it frightens me, and I moved a continent away to survive her. Both are true. Her love is a kitchen with the lights always on, a bowl always waiting. It is also a weight, all her unfinished dreams pressing into my back, asking me to carry them somewhere she never got to go.
I have spent years bracing against the criticism. I built the distance for it. And now she hands me tenderness instead, and I don’t know where to put it. It’s easier to run from someone who wounds you. Much harder to leave someone who is, right now, freezing soup with your name on it.
I replay the line. You’re my best achievement. Once more. My chest does something complicated.
I am so afraid of becoming the shape of what she wanted. And I am so afraid of never being enough of it.
I put my earphones in. Slipping Through My Fingers. Of course. The bus lights smear across the glass, gold streaks pulling long and then gone. Outside, Greece keeps happening without me.
When we get there, I decide, I’ll put on Mamma Mia. Pour the wine. Watch it on the balcony with the sea I can’t see yet.
I’ll call her tomorrow.
Or I won’t.
The song keeps playing. The lights keep smearing. I let her voice sit in my ear a little longer, saved, like soup in a freezer, for whenever I’m brave enough to go home.