Traffic Light Kisses

One Sunday night around 11:00, I decided to leave the usual comforts of my room. The string of twinkly lights, the white fluffy duvet and sheets, the scratched 45 records push-pinned to my wall, my childhood lamp embroidered with butterflies that radiates a subtle pink glow. I decided to venture into my parents’ room. I sat on the foot of their bed clutching my knees. I told them that despite making a steady recovery from a cold the week before I was feeling a little under the weather. I described my symptoms: a pain in the back of my neck, a headache between my eyes, a sore throat. Once they saw it wasn’t a ploy for getting out of school, they softened. But it wasn’t just my sinus that was hurting. My heart was aching in all the inexplicable ways a teenager’s does. I was disappointed that winter break was over, lonely after constant exposure to my best friends, and missing the boy I fell in love with this summer. I try every week to replicate his presence with a video call, but it is hollow, pixelated, lagging through the poor connection. Each time I trick myself into thinking he’s there, and each time we hang up, the emptiness cuts through me. I try to stop feeling so it’s easier, and I’m sad about that. 

“I just feel so numb.”

After hearing a sparse list of my emotional symptoms sprinkled with sputtering tears, my parents tried to console me. What neither of us knew at the time was that I didn’t really need to be fixed; I just needed them to be there with me, let it all sit for a while. But it was a school night pushing past 11:30. 

“Campbell, I know you hate it when I say this, and my mother would always say this to me so I don’t know if it will help… but I think what you really need is sleep.”  

I knew she was right, but I couldn’t stop thinking, Do I need sleep or does she want sleep? I considered asking her this but decided it wasn’t worth it, because I knew exactly which tedious pattern of argument would follow, so I half-assed a happy face, said I’d be fine and left, hurriedly. I went to wipe my tears, focus on the kind words they had offered me, and face the realities of school in the morning. I was pulling the covers back into place on my bed when she came through my door that always sits slightly ajar in its hinges. I knew why she was there, and I knew it wasn’t only out of concern for my circadian rhythm.

“I’m just at the end of my rope, I don’t know what else to say. I just think what will help all of us is if you can...”

“Sleep,” I finish her sentence.

She looked at the floor, embarrassed by her predictability. I tried to tell her that I don’t need sleep, I need time. Time to not be alone. I don’t need her to take away my pain anymore—only I can do that. But my words came out all wrong, and we slipped into our usual conflict-averse exchange, skirting around how we actually feel, masking our needs behind facades of unconditional love. She left as quietly as she came in, and before her bedroom door slammed shut I could hear her starting to talk to my dad about it. Salt in the wound. In the occasional times of turmoil in the Symmes-Ives household the score is always two to one. I sat scribbling in my notebook, gripping the stickers and black vinyl of the cover, wiping hot tears from my vision, trying to capture how intensely sad I felt, how angry I felt, finding solace in a pen. Ironically enough, I couldn’t sleep. I tossed and turned on a damp pillow until my mind shifted into restless dreams. That morning I had a fever, so last night’s quarrel was willfully forgotten.

❖

I had little patience for gardening as a kid. The constant feeling of dirt under the fingernails, the lugging of a green plastic watering can—it got old quick, much to my mother’s dismay. She promised me I would grow to love it as she did because she had felt the same thing about gardening when she was my age. She said her mother had promised her the same thing. I laughed in disbelief at this. She fit so perfectly in a garden, behind white picket or stone wall. She was folded in half, and her figure seemed to melt into the earth’s embrace. Clippers with red rubber grip in one hand, a wad of weeds in the other.  Dark auburn hair pulled back in a clip. Spring sun shining through the couple of frizzy strands around her face. A smudge of dirt on her forehead where she wiped away sweat with a gloved hand. Her face glowing, focused and content. It was impossible to think that once she had been as clueless and disinterested as me.

A few years flew by, and I started going to a private school in Westchester, New York, for fifth grade. Suddenly I knew kids my age who lived in Nyack and Bedford and Scarsdale, all hour-long drives from my remote house in the middle of the woods. I was no longer confined to my dead-end dirt road. I began to recognize the taste of independence, and my world began to expand to the vast county of Westchester. As exciting as this was for me, it meant a lot more driving for my mother. She was a loyal and prompt chauffeur, and on our long drives to birthday parties, dance classes, and bat mitzvahs we would talk. Talk in ways we never had before. Secrets didn’t have a place between us. When she picked me up from the train station, I would wedge my backpack in between my legs. I was always too lazy to throw it into the back. 

“How was school?”

“Good,” I would reply without thinking.

With one more probing question, she had me. I would spill the latest seventh-grade psychodrama. I was always embarrassed about just how much I told her, sometimes making her swear to never breathe a word of it to another parent. She would make good on this promise, though usually excluding my dad from the agreement. On all of our drives to god-knows-where, I watched her command the car with such assertive serenity. Waiting for distracted drivers patiently, her hand never hovering over the horn. Sometimes we would pull into the driveway only halfway through a podcast, and without saying anything, wait for the program to conclude before lugging everything into the house. When we zoomed through a yellow light, I would watch her kiss her fingertips and place them on the fuzzy gray ceiling. “Why do you do that with your hand when we go through yellow lights?” I asked once.

“I’m not sure what it means exactly, but my babysister Kitty would always do it, and I thought it was so cool.”  So did I.

Now I drive myself to dance classes and to birthday parties. I spend long drives in my own head, listening to music and singing along softly, and I always make sure to leave a kiss on the ceiling every time I squeeze through a yellow light.

Last night, I was taking too long to get ready for bed like I always do when I heard the echo of my mother’s footsteps outside my bedroom door. As she entered, I braced myself for that familiar edge in her voice signaling the grave pleas for sleep. But, she just slipped in through the door, nightgown-clad and shoulders shrinking her neck, and I could see in her face that she came for a different reason. “Insomnia’s bad tonight?” I asked, while I threw some clothes on a basket of folded laundry. She nodded and climbed under the covers. I  squeezed in between her and the corgi snoozing on my bed. I switched off my pink lamp with the butterflies, and all three of us just spooned, barely fitting on my full mattress. My mother’s hands traced the divots and curves in my back, and we talked about whatever was buzzing at the front of our minds. Our conversation was like a blown-up party balloon, lightly volleying back and forth, humming with traces of static electricity. I drifted into sleep easily that night, touched by the magic of her hands. Those hands that mold art out of seed and soil. I wonder if I will ever possess a power so divine in my fingertips.