A touch of Life

We must have been the same age, and yet the differences between our lives could be expressed in light-years. Stars sprinkled above the Incan Capital, when I almost tripped over four small colorful socks and witnessed something I couldn’t just walk away from.
She caught my attention when I stared unexpectedly into her young pearly eyes, standing out on the old dusty lanes around us.
There she sat, on a piece of cardboard against a colonial building that revealed the riches of a time long gone. She didn’t notice me, as she was busy warding off the relenting cold for a young boy.
With her legs curled around him, I followed her gray torn hands that caressed her son’s red, chapped cheeks. A mirthless mark that expressed the hard childhood of the Andes.
She pulled of her woolen hat, folded a pillow out of it and placed it under the little one’s head. In Quechua, her mother tongue, she soothingly sang into his ear while the young boy fought his own battle to fall asleep.
Thinking I would be well prepared by now, I had become arrogant. Peru had taught me a lot of tough lessons, but Cusco took me by surprise once again. Touched by this bittersweet encounter, the crowded streets where taxis abounded and excited cackling tourists wander suddenly faded away. Time in the “Ombligo del mundo” slowed down. For an instance I felt close to my own mum, while having the sensation of an astronaut far from home, cut off from the navel cord.
As the boy fell asleep, with his head against his mother’s chest I noticed a subtle relief on her face, the pure loving satisfaction of a mother’s job well done. “How did you do that? Who are you? You’re still a girl my age, but somehow you were able to be stronger than that, more than you appear to be”.
In a flash, images of my own childhood blended in with reality, contrasting both lives of now and then. The experience of what’s played out in front of me made me realize what my own mother really means to me. I felt an immense respect. She who knows as no one else what it takes to carry the fate for two.
This night I met a force, a force called mother.
In the end her fatigue wears her down as her head glides slowly down the wall she was laying against. Left powerless and touched by her tenderness on these rough Peruvian streets, I wanted to thank her for giving me the words I wanted my mother to hear. But instead I kept staring, a tear rolled down my cheek, the only thing I could give that night. You might guess it, we never met again.