Nostalgia

• Amber Cunneen, Grade 12, All Saints Anglican School
• Short Story
• 2012

Excellence Award in the 'Legendary 2012' competition

Across the room Stevie Nicks is crooning from the record player, making me think of my mother. And how every time I ask her to talk of her younger self she brushes me off, only occasionally giving me tiny insights into her teenage pleasures. Her affinity for the front-woman of Fleetwood Mac being the one fact she would give most readily. I could picture her as she was then, prior to her child and unhappy marriage, carefree in the orange Datsun I’d spied in the few photos I was privy to, wild sea-salt spray hair falling in a tangle behind her. Smiling and dreaming.
From what I could gather, she was quite different to me, preferring the company of nature to the leaves of books. When I was a child she never could understand why I resisted the national park-walks she loved so much. So eventually I stopped getting invited. There was some common ground however, apparently she was artistic once and always smiled if she saw me painting. I didn’t realise how important this interest was until once, in the basement of the house I was first brought home to, I found hundreds of sketches that were once a portfolio destined for the College of Fine Arts in Sydney. It made me want to weep, wondering how she’d ended up so far North, raising so many children that weren’t her own and let her dreams slip so far from her grasp.
There’s a photograph of her in the far corner of my room; perched on the bookcase that almost reaches the ceiling, half-hidden from vision by the old Pepsi bottle my father has held onto since his teens. In it she caresses her heavily pregnant stomach, clothed in a loose crimson dress. It is the most serene I’ve ever seen her, and I can’t help but compare the warmth of the abandoned house behind her, chosen only for its aesthetic beauty, to the sterile home we live in now. Perhaps she would prefer it there, sketching in the empty sea-side cottage in the company of the possibility of a child, instead of the reality of one.
Then I think of my mother as I know her: how her hair is now immaculately styled and tame, and how at some point her blue eyes lost their reflection of the sea. And I hope desperately that thirty years from now, my daughter won’t sit in my basement surrounded by abandoned manuscripts, wondering why her mother gave up on her dreams.