Young Writers Society

Yin Yang

It was only twenty degrees outside, but I wasn’t cold. Was it even possible to be cold when someone is so angry? I knew going to my mother’s for Christmas was an awful idea. We fought over everything: even trivial things, but it all added up. She seemed to be trying to pick fights with me, constantly criticizing my disheveled appearance, my choice of profession: music teacher, and my lack of any serious relationships at age thirty one. This time she had gone too far, saying my life was going nowhere and I needed to “get it together”. Get it together? How dare she?

Our relationship didn’t use to be so bad when my had been father around. He kept the peace, diffusing tense situations with a joke or a smile. Our relationship had been very close and we rarely argued. My mother and he were intensely in love, his jokes the perfect counterpart to her seriousness. He was good natured enough to not be upset by my mother’s careless insensitive remarks, and both of them knew she didn’t really mean them. His only serious flaw had been his heavy smoking, which lead to his death from lung cancer earlier in this year. This tragic blow had shattered my mother’s life, and made our relationship just that much tenser. We continually squabbled because she refused to let out her emotions, so I kept my intense hurt and stinging doubt carefully hidden. Without him around I had no idea how I would be able to tolerate my mother.

I stomped down the dirt road leading form my mother’s house, my arms tightly crossed against my chest. We were complete opposites, my mother and I. She was a realist: grounded, logical, and always in control of the situation. She was always completely organized and on top of things. She kept a detailed calendar, had a daily schedule, and her life was full of lists of things to do. There was so much structure, rigidity, and lack of emotion there that was incomprehensible to me. I am an idealist: a visionary, unsure of myself, but passionate in everything I do. I am motivated by love over money; dreams over reality. I am expressive and blatantly honest, some might say blunt. I react to things strongly and purely. I am a mess, always losing things, forgetting appointments, and I can hardly keep track of myself. We are like vinegar and baking soda: prone to explosion.

I walked over to the black wooden fence that marked the edge of the property, and leaned against it, my forearms resting on the top post. I was in the middle of some unknown town in Massachusetts the day after a nor’easter. There was a total of a foot of snow on the ground, several inches lingering on the road even after the most recent plowing. An inch of snow dusted the limbs of the dark trees around me. I watched my breath create a cloud of steam in front of me, trying to absorb the peace. If only it were that easy to just take over feelings through osmosis; to forget everything going on around me. It would have seemed far more beautiful in a different situation, I supposed. The contrast was picturesque. There was only black and white: untouched snow, and the black of the trees and their limbs. It was just like my mother and I: black vs. white, total opposites in a constant struggle against one another, both determined not to blur together into gray.

I heard the crunch of snow underfoot coming from behind me and I glanced over my shoulder to see my mother walking towards me. Her long dark hair was tied neatly in a knot at the base of her neck, not a hair out of place, as usual. I resumed leaning against the fence, staring off into the distance, pretending I hadn’t seen her. We both knew I had. She stopped once she was next to me, and I felt her hand rest against my shoulder. I continued to look straight ahead.

“I’m sorry,” I heard her say. Silence stretched between us after those two words left her lips. I was afraid to speak for fear of snapping the tenuous thread of understanding that connected us at this moment.

“It’s okay,” I whispered eventually. No other words were needed. It was the contrast between black and white that gave the surrounding wintry scene its beauty, just like it was our distinct differences that made our relationship so special. Without the contrast of black and white, everything would be a single shade of gray.