The phone rang at 6:10.
Buryana was awake, but she was still lying in bed. She was drinking water and mentally leafing through what lay ahead of her. A client case was spinning in her head.
The screen said: Mira. But the voice she heard was not hers.
– Is this Buryana, I am Mira’s neighbor. She asked me to call you. She has been doubled over all night, she has severe abdominal pain. I called an ambulance, they are suggesting taking her to the hospital, they need to run tests to see whether she needs surgery, but she says – no, under no circumstances! She wants to be at home, just not alone. But I am at work and I cannot stay.
– Thank you for calling, we are leaving right away – Buryana jumped up before she had even processed it and rushed toward the bathroom.
She almost swept Kin away, who was standing on the threshold with bare feet and messy hair. There was worry in his eyes.
– I heard, about Mira. Are we going?
– Yes. I just need to get ready.
– How much time do I have?
– Half an hour. I’m almost ready, you know I have a ready list and I pack according to it. I need to call Iv to feed Sirena (with Iv – Ivonne according to her ID card – they had appeared together on the same day, in the same maternity ward). Don’t forget Bruno’s things!
She only had to add the things Mira loved – basil tea, the special mix that her holistic spirit brewed for her friend’s lower back, and the MP3 player with Mariza’s gentle, sensual and nostalgic fado. Naturally, also the clear, good, focused intentions that raise and maintain a high vibration.
Good grief, where would she be without all the knowledge about pain, about energetic alignment, about therapeutic words that she had stuffed over the years into the “storage room” for precisely such cases!
The “storage room” was several flash drives and the laptop. Dear thing, it had taken on the shape of a pregnant woman from all the information that Buryana methodically, with zeal and enviable persistence, stuffed into it and saved on the principle “it may come in handy.” That was how she felt certain she had under control everything that could go off the rails.
The stream of the shower was gently caressing her and would not let her go, as if it wanted to wash away all the tension and the thoughts not to forget something important. The crystal drops crawled over her skin and dissolved into her, washing away, coaxing: “Don’t rush, relax, allow yourself this pleasure, climb with us to seventh heaven!”
– Do you need Mitch Buchannon? Are you here, don’t drain away?
“Excuse me, from the macho rescuer in a swimsuit!!!” – Voice of Kin made her collapse from the heights and grab the towel sharply. Laughter flooded her, unable to imagine how The Rock or Hasselhoff was taking her down naked from the pink cotton into which she had melted!
The plan was ready, she cheerfully grabbed the little suitcase and the backpack and began filling them. Everything in her smelled fresh and she was hurrying, she wanted to preserve and pass that feeling on to Mira.
20 minutes later:
The freshness and cheerfulness got frightened when they heard the words with which she “rewarded” herself after she saw that the little jar with the ointment was empty, because she had never found time to mix the remedies. And they fled cosmically when she rushed to look for the basil tea. There was basil, but it was smiling and intoxicating her from the pot. She grabbed a few sprigs – after all, she could at least make pasta with her favorite Giovanni sauce.
Thank God! – she squealed with joy when she found the MP3 player almost immediately in the pocket of the sweatshirt. But the most important thing – where the hell were the two flash drives with the folders for healing, recipes, reflexology, acupressure and all the energy practices that she, like a loving mother, had tucked away in them! There, they were needed and had disappeared! The search turned into “not here, not here, not here”…
Kin watched her circle like a lost electron between the kitchen, the laptop, the suitcase, the backpack and the kitchen again. She was spinning in circles, radiating both control and paralysis. He knew that when it became like this, she was trying to be perfect instead of simply being.
– Mom,… what is going on, what are we doing?! Mira needs us, not jars, ointments and flash drives.
The irritation in his tone pricked her and made her angry. Mr. Know-It-All, universal calm. She clenched her teeth.
And she heard something she did not want to hear, least of all from her child:
– I’ll leave then, because she shouldn’t be alone. There is a bus soon, and you, when you gather and load the “storage room” with the luggage in it, come.
Buryana stopped. In her hand – a jar without a lid. In her head – chaos of practices, webinars, books and recorded voices. Her thoughts were crashing into the trap of anxiety: “I know what I have to do, I don’t need the ‘storage room,’ so many courses, studying, reading…”
She heard the quiet, scraping whisper of life: “Yes, yes, you know a lot, but have you absorbed all of it. Set off with what you have absorbed, not with what you have recorded. If you haven’t practiced it, you haven’t lived it. And I am looking to see whether you have become what you do”
But instead of unleashing the flood of tears with which she regularly washed the wounds of her imperfection, it acted on her like a sobering slap. Oh, to hug Mira sooner and pour into her the faith that a black penny, such as she was, does not get lost!
– I have the feeling that I am entering life unprepared – she said while setting the alarm.
– And I have the feeling that this is exactly how everything real begins. With a “Start” button, not with a “Research” button – Kin replied beside her.
Yes, but – no! Her car was definitely not as wise as her son and did not think that everything begins with the “Start” button. So it refused to start. This had already happened to her several times and she kept postponing the clear signs. Apparently the priorities were wrong in their order!
The bus had left, and she could no longer afford the luxury of behaving like a sniffling spoiled child, leaning on Kin like a crutch. She called a taxi, after 5 minutes they docked and she was already ringing the doorbell of Simeon – temporarily her husband and permanently Kin’s father.
The astonishment that filled his light-green eyes at seeing them at such an hour on a Saturday morning on his doorstep, Buryana interrupted with a slightly nervous voice and fired off:
– I need your car, mine refuses to start. Will you need it for the weekend?
He sensed that he was not going to get an explanation, he was strongly intuitive, and went for the keys.
– I’m traveling on a business trip and I’ll be back next Saturday, then I’ll take the car. Be careful on the road! – he hugged Kin, and hugged her too.
Should she admire him – he did not even ask where they were going and he looked magnificent with light stubble and all his muscles in just boxer shorts! There was something fateful in the incident with the car. Mira did not like him and often criticized him, and now, in order to reach her, they ended up relying precisely on “the Peacock-narcissist,” as she called him.
The Audi purred quietly and contentedly, they had about an hour and a half of road ahead. If only they did not take her to the hospital! She did not like hospitals, she had a pile of experiences in them – personal ones and with people she loved. In order to stay away, she had taken all kinds of courses, filled an n-number of flash drives and her brain with information that was like an insurance policy to her. And here she was now, with her ex’s car, Kin’s philosophies, a suitcase of clothes and unarmed with the flash drives, feeling naked as a gun. Only with a thermos of coffee and a card for Mira, on which Kin wrote: “You are part of my best memories. Now I want you to be part of my good present too.”
She realized that the tension had disappeared, that her thoughts had merged with the road, which was bending between ridges and meanders, and that she was humming “Today is the best day.”
And when the sun struck them through the window and tangled itself in her son’s hair, Buryana said to herself: “The storage room is full, but life is not a library. It wants taste, smell, step. And I am happy that I set off unfinished, but free.”
She knew that she and Mira would have many more sunrises in which they would bow and sing to the Luminary and invent ever greater challenges for the days of doing nothing.
She liked Kin’s tousled thoughts and adventurous spirit, and in moments like that she was very glad that he had chosen her as his “mamushka” (he called her that because when he was little he loved her to hug him and it remained from “Mom, give me a hug!”)
She set off from a place full of data, solutions and road maps. With rooms in which she had locked the whole truth about herself, trying to turn them into a refuge.
Some people have answers for everything – they know, understand, analyze. But life asks:
“Are you living? Will you act… or will you wait for the ideal time for applying?”
And the Heart says:
“The ideal time is you, now.”