The sun in Cyprus in August is not like Swedish sun. Swedish sun is gentle — it asks permission before it enters, it tucks itself away by nine in the evening like a good child. The Cyprus sun is something else entirely. It is a sovereign. It does not ask.
We had arrived on holiday, my mother and I, and I had been delirious with happiness — the greenness of it, the heat like an embrace, the jasmine-thick air. I was six years old and the world was still organised around my mother's face. Everything I felt, I felt in relation to her. Her joy was my joy. Her calm was my calm.
And then she fainted.
One moment she was there, standing at the edge of the hotel pool in her white cotton dress, and then she was not. She went down in sections — her knees first, then the rest of her. The sound was quiet and final.
I stood very still. The water in the pool continued to glitter. Someone screamed — not me. I was beyond screaming. I had entered some small, cold room inside myself where there was no sound at all.
This is the thing about being six: you don't yet understand about recovery. You don't know that people faint and then come back. You only know that your mother has ceased to be vertical, and that the world is reorganising itself around her absence, and that this is the worst thing that has ever happened, including all the small terrible things — the scraped knees and the nights afraid of the dark.
She came back. Of course she came back. Sunstroke, they said. Too much heat. She needed water, shade, rest.
But I have never forgotten that moment of standing at the pool's edge. I have never forgotten what it felt like to understand, for the first time, that the people you love can leave. That the world contains this possibility. That beauty and danger live so close together they sometimes breathe the same air.
I still think about it when the sun is very strong. When I'm somewhere hot and sovereign, with jasmine in the air.
I still feel, just for a moment, six years old.
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*From* Bloom Anyway: A Memoir