breaking away

Age had pinched her face into severe creases and devoured her lips.She lay sleeping,shaking with palsy as though a current were being run through her.Unsure what I felt,I shifted uncomftorably from one foot to the other.Here was the overbearing,intimidating woman who had stomped her way into my dreams for so many years after I left,...or as my brothers and I halfheartedly joked,escaped.Her eyes a bright violet made even brighter from all the morphine coursing through her body.Unblinking reminders of the woman I remembered.A woman with a face full of rage and hate blotched red with alcohol who dominated my existence untill I left for the Navy some twenty years earlier.A lifetime full of anger and resentment had made me old before my time and the weight of it all seemed to drop me to my knees beside her metal prison.The tears and sobbing I had kept inside for all those years came suddenly and awkwardly as I buried my face in the cloth beside her arm.When I finaly regained my composure and lifted my head she was gone.