The rustle of worn, oversized jeans brings me out of my hazy slumber, my eyes fluttering in a half attempt at wakefulness. They squint in the soft, ten o’clock sunlight, roaming my walls with distant curiosity. The familiarity of the cream nearly has me nodding off again, but instead I am content to lay languidly in bed for a few moments, caught in the comfortable in between of sleep and wake.
I can hear my mother’s consistent tred in the room next to mine - ours, now - but I am wrapped up in the way dust floats beside my window like minuscule jellyfish in the warm, morning tide. They wink at me slowly and they pass, leaving their brothers to wink in their wake. A flicker - perhaps a bird or something to that nature - leaves the little dust in the dark and I frown to myself before the mass passes, feeling as if I’ve been cheated of some dance that I had been admiring so innocently and delightfully just a moment before. The dust returns, just as it was before, and I can feel some deep, meaningful analogy twinging on me, but my sleepy brain pushes it away for later.
Stretching my hands under the cool pillow, I fall into my mattress once more and trace the lines of my mother’s trundle bed across from me with my sleep scratchy eyes. The gaudy purple blanket lays draped over her smooth, floral comforter, as always, and the two pillows she uses to block the cold that permeates the wall are stacked neatly against her pillow. Shoes lining the space at the foot of her bed, my mother could probably pass a military inspection, even on a lazy Sunday morning.
My clock reads 10:13 when I glance at its harsh, fluorescent display before turning my attention to my plain ceiling instead. A small smile tugs at my lips as I spot the small craters there, from my attempt at remodeling on my own. Had I known no glue glow stickers were so difficult to remove, I wouldn’t had even tried, but I hadn’t and the evidence was spread across my ceiling quite pointedly. The realtor had said that would need to be fixed before we could sell.
Sighing, I turn back to watch the dust float past me for at least a few more moments. I really do love that. Watching the dust, that is. It’s almost poetic in a way: how the light needs to have just the right intensity, the room just the right conductivity, my belongings just the right amount of dust. My mother would dispute the last item on that list, but I think that’s the difference between her and I. I see beauty in the dust on a lazy Sunday morning, whereas she sees beauty in the sinking sun on weary bones and clean floors. I’ve always dreamed of a cozy little apartment, a cottage, perhaps. One in which the dust floats just right in the sunlight and I can sleep in late on Sundays, watching that dust.
And so off again I nod, to the gentle thump of my mother’s sneakers and the dance of wavering dust, in the warm Sunday light.