All I Want is More. Forever.

Yesterday I received a package. So it's Christmastime and that shouldn't be unusual. I didn't recognize the sender, but the package was one of those cute little padded manila numbers. I could feel the bubble wrap inside and I opened the envelope before I tackled the mound of mail that had accumulated while I'd been out of town on vacation.

Well. A surprise. To be sure.

I have some stepsiblings that I no longer see, or speak to. There's really no animosity, it's more that our parents aren't married to each other anymore. One of those long-ago stepsisters sent me a CD, and a note. She thought I might want to have an audio recording of my mother's voice. She (the stepsister) had found an old cassette tape and converted it over to CD. The note said she hoped I might "find comfort".

Well. I wasn't expecting that.

I played it this morning. My mother apparently taped herself preparing for a sales training meeting. She was a manager for a large cosmetics company and she held meetings quite often. I remember that she'd be out late a lot of nights and would come home exhausted, even when she was going through chemotherapy the first time.

I sat on the couch this morning and listened to her. At first it didn't sound like her. She was certainly reading from a script. She talked about commissions and boosting sales. She talked about bonuses of pressure cookers and 8-track tape players.

And then. And then I heard her say it. "Bye!" A door shut in the background. She was saying goodbye to someone, one of her children as they left the house. The way she said it, the way she stopped in mid-sentence to acknowledge a child...

8 minutes. That's all there was. 8 minutes of my mother's voice. I'm doing fine after hearing it. I'm not sad. I'm not distraught. I'm simply wanting of more. It's what I've wanted all along - just more. All I want is forever.