playing pretend

            She was a little older than I was – about twelve. Her braids hung loosely over the low garden wall as she leant over it, smiling at me with a strange pair of liquid brown eyes – which dazzled red when they caught the sun.

            “How old are you?” she asked me, and I blinked, because her lips hadn’t moved.

            “Ten,” I replied and her eyes widened.

            “I think I can read minds,” she said.

            It was a funny way to begin a friendship, but she crossed the wall and entered our garden, landing on the tulip bed. I pulled her away hurriedly: my mother was extremely sensitive about the flowers.

            We were children and it was easy to believe. She spoke to me always with her mind, and projected what she read in others’ minds into mine, so that I could share. We learnt many things about the world that way, and it was frightening sometimes.

            One night my mother came home from work crying. She pretended her eyes were dry, but we could always tell.

            “How are you today?” she smiled, before she went upstairs. That wasn’t the sort of thing she usually said. She gave me a strange look before she went, a half-hungry, yearning look of despair that lasted a second before she turned away.

            My friend looked at me. Both our eyes were brimming with tears. And both of us knew why.

            “I’m sorry,” she broke down. “I didn’t want you to know.”

            And she ran out of the room.

            I stood there, unable to move. My mother was going to die. She knew – she hadn’t wanted to tell me. But I knew. And it was terrible. Every day after that was forced. I couldn’t talk to my mother – every word I said, every look I gave her was unnatural. And this made her sad. She couldn’t tell me and she didn’t know why I wasn’t myself. Every hour of everyday went by just as before – a little strained, neither of us knowing what to do, but both knowing what shouldn’t be known.

            Sometimes not knowing can be a good thing, I told my friend. Knowledge can be terrible. And sad. She never wanted to do it again. She hated her ability. Ever time I met her, there was something in the way she talked that told me that what we had discovered had affected her so much that she’d forgotten how to live. She was older and it was my mother. There are some secrets that should not come in the way of love, she told me, sounding wiser than her years. I didn’t understand. She had grown older.

            “I have to tell you something,” she began. I wasn’t listening. I was staring at the sun, just about to be covered by a massive cloud, grey and huge – like some huge hungry monster of the future. And the sunrays were struggling. It gave me peace, somehow.

            “I can’t really,” she said again.

            “Can’t what?” I asked.

            “I can’t read minds.”

            I looked around and stared at her through my eyes. Hypnotizing apple-green eyes – my mother used to say. I just found them somehow frightening in the mirror.

            “It’s true,” she said. “I have never been able to do it alone. It’s all you. You’re the one who can read minds. I was just pretending it was me.”

            I turned back towards the sun.

            “I know,” I said.