Free After I Wake by Emma Griffiths Page A

minutes have passed that I realize the calm before the storm wasn’t metaphorical as I was expecting. It’s a legitimate storm. How perfect. All semblance of calm is gone, but so is another layer of depression. I feel a strange freedom as words begin to lose their sense of foreignness.
    I sit in the beanbag as more thunder rattles the windowpanes. My notepad quickly fills with lines, and I know I’ll be spending time later, during the actual day, crafting poems and refining them to my usual standards. They won’t be good yet. I’m so far out of practice with the way words interact, but I’m awkwardly full of determination because I know I can do it.
    Ten minutes later, I’m gently shaking my mom’s shoulder, whispering urgently. She snaps awake immediately, the only woman in the world able to sleep through the recently passed storm but wake up at the mere hint of her daughter’s voice. She is nothing less than a professional mother. But to be fair, she’s been at it for quite a while. And I’ve given her some challenges as far as being her daughter goes.
    â€œWhat’s wrong?” Her eyes fill with worry as I stand over her, and I can only giggle. After a minute I realize that it’s probably disconcerting, so I stop and hand her the poem that is crumpled in my fist, with sweat and smeared pencil lines already coating the creases.
    She turns on the bedside lamp and rapidly scans the sheet of paper with the pathetic handwriting scrawled across it. My mom starts to cry a little, and the remaining creases fill with the saline dripping from her face.
    â€œYou did it,” she murmurs.
    â€œI did it,” I echo. My voice has an undeniable joy to it. “I will go back to bed shortly,” I start, “but can I staple this one to the corkboard?” We go downstairs together, and my poem secures a position in the corner.
    Over the years, the corkboard in our kitchen has become host to a number of poems, ones I’ve enjoyed so much that I couldn’t let them go, and so I tacked them up to remember them. Now, my new poem is up there. My 4:00 a.m. root beer tastes like victory and carbonated goodness. As I leave the kitchen to go back up to my bedroom, I turn back to give my mom a hug.
    She puts a date on the bottom of the poem. When she turns and sees me glowering at her for touching my work, she laughs, a pure crystalline jingle that sounds rusty to the both of us. I keep forgetting how hard this has been on her too. She almost lost a daughter a few different times. At some point, she kind of did. I think now that she might have one back but the better, battle-worn one I like being.
    When my mom’s laugh cuts off, she remarks quietly, “I had almost forgotten what that felt like. It’s been a while. And stop looking at me like that, Carter Alice. I want to remember the date that I feel like you really came back to me. Do you have a title for it? I can write one in if you want. I want to remember this, the day and moment your purpose came back.” Her tone whips back and forth from chastising to stern to soft. Her gaze never leaves my face.
    I squint at the poem for a moment before coming up with the perfect title. “Call it ‘The Obligatory Rhyming Poem of UGH.’”
    â€œOf what?” Confusion lines my mother’s face, and I grin, getting ready to go into a long-winded explanation.
    â€œâ€˜The Obligatory Rhyming Poem of UGH.’ Ugh being U - G - H , like an annoyed sigh that wholly represents my utter despisal of rhyming poems and the like.” I’m fairly certain my sentences are running on and together, but I don’t care. I’m on a roll. No, I’m soaring on rounded bread. That’s much more like it. I continue, enunciating the primal sound. “UGH, like an uuuuuuuuuuggghhhhhhh kind of noise.”
    My mom just nods and pencils it in. She’s probably just humoring me. I’m positive she