Punching Air

The December wind embraced my shoulders the first night I walked past my dead mother’s reincarnation on the crowded streets of downtown Los Angeles. 

I didn’t know how I could tell it was her if I’m being honest with you. Her new body looked about six years old, still a young boy like I was seventeen years ago. His messy hair was the color of chestnut and he had blue popsicle juice dripping down his forearms. But still, I could tell from a mile away: He has my mother’s soul. In just one glance, I feel a crippling pain in my chest that I hadn’t felt in a very long time. 

Perhaps you’ve had your own experiences with “déjà vu.” You see a stranger in a shopping mall or an airport who looks so familiar, but you can’t think of a single interaction you’ve had with them. Maybe they look like an old friend or someone you saw once on an infomercial. Maybe it’s just the way they move that reminds you of someone you actually know. I’ve had many of these instances. I might sit at a cafe and gaze at some man for hours just to realize that he simply looks like my old high school English teacher.

It seems like a difficult thing, to gauge whether or not a stranger is a reincarnation of someone you loved. Or maybe you’d think there would be some physical similarities to make it easier. But my dark-skinned Asian mother is now a pale brunette little boy, yet I can recognize her in an instant. It’s the most peculiar thing. 

“I saw Mom,” I tell my sister. 

“Really?” she asks. “How is she?”

“Good, I guess.”

“How could you tell?” I can’t tell if she believes me or not.

“I don’t know exactly, but the moment I saw her, I just knew.”

“Weird.”

“Isn’t it?”

“Well,” she says. She might be thinking I’m talking about Mom’s ghost. “Did you say ‘hi’ to her or something?”

“I don’t think it would have been appropriate.”

I contemplated it, though. 

It’s that cold December night. The boy and his grandmother walk hand-in-hand up Sunset Boulevard. I make my way down Vine Street. 

All I wish is for some kind of interaction with him. Just a minute or two would be enough to introduce myself, ask him his favorite color, and — most importantly — describe to him in great detail what a miracle it is that the universe would choose him to bear my mother’s spirit and then send him down the same path as me at exactly 8:24 PM on this very night. 

The opportunity is right there. 

He’s just about five feet away now.

How do I broach the subject? What can I say?

“Hey, kid! Wanna know something crazy…?”

No way. I sound like a predator.

“Young man, do you happen to have a few minutes to tell me a little about yourself?”

Absolutely absurd. I’m bound to get arrested if I start the conversation that way. 

I guess, I could cut to the chase. “Good evening. You are my mother.”

No, nobody would believe it, let alone the boy and his grandmother.

Even if they did, it’s not like I can maintain a relationship with this random family. That’s a plausible theory, they might say, now goodbye. There’s an incredibly narrow chance this might happen but if I heard the word goodbye from my mother again, I would crumble into a million pieces. I’ll be a twenty-three-year-old sobbing mess crouched on the corner of Sunset and Vine. 

We pass in front of an American diner. Warm barbecue smoke clouds my vision. The cement sidewalk is littered with cigarette butts, and I inhale the savory scent of fried potatoes. I can’t bring myself to talk to the boy. He’s wearing a camouflage print T-shirt and grasps his grandmother’s hand with his sticky little fingers. His eyelids are droopy; it’s probably past his bedtime. Does he ever have dreams about his past life?

I walk a few more steps and turn to look at them again. But they’re gone, disappearing faster than the wind into the bustling Los Angeles night. 

It’s at this very instant, I think of what I really want to say to the child. 

It would’ve sounded something like this: 

"Long, long ago, there lived a boy with a mother. His mother was a woman who always kept her promises and when she left home for a very dangerous journey, she promised that she would come back to visit him, but she would be wearing a disguise. It would take a miracle for them to ever see each other again but he believed her. He spent the next ten years studying the people around him, hoping to find his mother in their idiosyncrasies. 

And alas, the miracle happened on the year the boy turned twenty-three years old. One winter night, the boy finally saw his mother walking down the Sunset Boulevard. She looked like an entirely different person, but the boy knew it was her.

'It’s really you,' he said to her. 'I’ve been waiting all this time.'

'I’m sorry it took so long,' she replied. 'I’ve missed you.'

They sat in an American diner across from each other and talked for hours, stuffing themselves with fried potatoes and ice cream. There were so many words left unspoken that they could finally tell each other. As they talked, the boy’s mother began to look more and more like her old self. It was as if their reunion had healed something in her. A miracle was the only way to describe it. 

When the diner closed, the mother and son walked hand-in-hand down Vine Street to his apartment. The boy never had to search for pieces of his mother in the eyes of strangers ever again. 

Wouldn’t that be a happy ending?"

There were so many things I could have said to my mother. But she’s gone and all I can do is whisper my story to the wind echoing down Sunset Boulevard.