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The Weight of Purple Blooms
The rain arrived without warning, the way grief always does.
Nadia pulled her father's old Corolla into the gravel lot, wipers fighting a losing battle against the downpour. Through the blurred windshield, the motel emerged like something from a fever dream—neon bleeding red into the storm, the word MOTEL stuttering its electric pulse against the darkness. One letter had surrendered to time, leaving a gap like a missing answer to an unasked question.
She'd driven for eleven hours straight. Away from the apartment that still smelled like Mama's rosewater. Away from relatives whose sympathy felt like hands pressing on a wound. Away from her younger sister Zara's red-rimmed eyes that kept asking the question neither could answer: How do we keep living when the center of our world has stopped?
The engine ticked in the silence after she turned it off. Rain hammered the roof like impatient fingers. She should find a better place—something clean, modern, safe. But her hands wouldn't reach for the keys. This place felt right in its wrongness. Forgotten. Liminal. A place where you could pause between grief and whatever came after.
The motel office smelled of old coffee and resignation. A woman sat behind the counter—sixty, maybe older, with silver hair pulled back and eyes that had witnessed too many storms, both meteorological and human.
"One night?" Her voice was neither warm nor cold. Simply present.
"I don't know." Nadia heard the exhaustion in her own voice. "Maybe."
The woman slid a brass key across scarred wood. "Room 9. End of the hall. Hot water's temperamental but honest." She paused, studying Nadia with an unnerving clarity. "There's tea in the lobby. Chamomile. For the sleepless."
"Thank you."
"The storm's not going anywhere tonight." The woman returned to her paperback, a gesture of dismissal and permission both. "Neither should you."
Room 9 was exactly what Nadia expected: worn carpet, wallpaper peeling at the seams, a bed that sagged in the middle like a question mark. But it was clean enough, and quiet, and not home. Right now, that was all she needed.
She dropped her overnight bag and moved to the window. Rain transformed the parking lot into a dark mirror, reflecting the neon glow in fractured reds and blues. Beyond the motel, she could barely make out the silhouette of something massive—a billboard or abandoned structure rising against the storm.
Her phone buzzed. Zara. Again.
Where are you? Apu is worried. I'm worried. Please just tell us you're okay.
Nadia typed and deleted three responses before settling on: I'm safe. Need time. Love you.
Another buzz. Mama wouldn't want you to hurt like this.
The words landed like a fist. Because they were true. And because truth didn't make the pain smaller.
Mama had fought cancer for three years with the quiet determination she'd brought to everything—raising two daughters alone after Baba died, working double shifts at the hospital, never missing a single school play or parent conference. Even at the end, morphine-soft and fading, she'd smiled and said, "My girls. You'll be okay. You have each other."
But what if they weren't okay? What if the center couldn't hold?
Nadia pressed her forehead against the cool glass, watching rain carve temporary rivers down the window. Her reflection stared back—hollow-eyed, hair unwashed, wearing one of Mama's old cardigans because it still held her scent.
She closed her eyes.
When she opened them, the sky had changed.
The storm clouds had torn open like a wound, revealing a vast expanse of deep crimson. And there, impossible and undeniable, was a face. Enormous. Ethereal. A woman's face tilted back, mouth open, as if releasing a breath she'd held for centuries. Rain poured from her like tears, like prayers, like all the grief the earth couldn't contain.
Nadia's breath caught.
The face looked nothing like her mother. And everything like her. The surrender in the expression. The peace wrapped in sorrow. The way pain and beauty could somehow occupy the same space.
She stumbled backward, heart hammering. This wasn't real. Couldn't be real. Grief hallucination. Exhaustion. Her rational mind supplied explanations even as her hand reached for the door.
The rain hit her like a baptism as she stepped into the parking lot. Cold. Sharp. Undeniably real. She tilted her face upward, rain mixing with tears she hadn't known she was crying.
The face remained. Patient. Witnessing.
"I don't know how to do this," Nadia whispered to the sky, to the rain, to whatever mystery had painted this impossible vision. "I don't know how to be in a world where she isn't."
The rain intensified, and for a moment—just a breath—she felt something. Not her mother. Not exactly. But something like permission. Like the universe saying: Your grief is seen. Your love is witnessed. And it's okay to not know.
"What is it?" A voice behind her.
Nadia turned. The motel keeper stood in the doorway, wrapped in a shawl, following Nadia's gaze upward.
"You see it too?" Nadia's voice cracked. "The face?"
The woman was quiet for a long moment. "I see rain. And a woman standing in it, looking up. I see someone asking the sky for answers."
"I thought I was losing my mind."
"Maybe." The woman stepped closer, rain darkening her shawl. "Or maybe you're finally letting yourself feel everything you've been running from." She gestured to the sky. "What do you see up there?"
"I see..." Nadia searched for words. "I see pain. And beauty. I see someone letting go of something too heavy to carry alone."
"Then maybe that's what you're supposed to see."
They stood together in the rain, two strangers bearing witness to different truths in the same storm.
"My mother died three weeks ago," Nadia said softly. "And I don't know how to carry this."
"You're not supposed to carry it alone." The woman's voice was gentle. "That's why we have rain. To remind us that the sky knows how to cry too."
Hours later, Nadia sat on the motel bed, wrapped in a thin towel, phone in hand. She opened the family chat.
Zara. I'm at a motel somewhere in the middle of nowhere. And I'm not okay. But I think that's okay.
The response came immediately: Where? I'm coming.
No. Not yet. Soon. I just needed to breathe for a minute. Away from everything.
Apu, we're drowning without you here.
Nadia's chest tightened. She typed slowly: I know. I'm drowning too. But maybe we need to drown separately for a minute before we can swim together.
A pause. Then: Mama used to say the ocean can't be crossed by standing and looking at it.
Despite everything, Nadia smiled. Mama had a saying for everything. Most of them borrowed from poets she'd loved—Rumi, Tagore, Gibran—mixed with her own hard-won wisdom.
She also said, Nadia typed, that sometimes you need to stand still before you know which direction to swim.
When are you coming home?
Soon. I promise. I just need to remember how.
She set the phone down and moved back to the window. The crimson had faded from the sky, leaving behind deep blues and purples—storm colors softening toward dawn. The face was gone. But Nadia could still feel its presence, like an afterimage burned into her mind.
She pulled out her journal—untouched since the funeral. Her hand trembled as she opened to a blank page.
She wrote until her hand cramped, until the sky shifted from black to grey to the pale blue of almost-morning. She wrote about Mama's laugh. Her terrible cooking. The way she'd sing off-key while folding laundry. The time she'd stayed up all night helping Nadia finish a school project, even though she had a double shift the next day.
She wrote about the last conversation. The hospice room. The way Mama's hand had felt—paper-thin and precious.
And finally, she wrote: I don't know how to let you go. But I think you're teaching me.
When the sun finally broke through the clouds, Nadia packed her bag. The motel keeper was at the counter, same as the night before, as if she'd never left.
"Leaving?"
"Going home." Nadia set the key on the counter. "Thank you. For last night. For..."
"I didn't do anything."
"You stood in the rain."
The woman smiled—small, knowing. "Sometimes that's enough." She slid something across the counter. A postcard, faded and worn. "This came with the motel when I bought it. Previous owner left it. I think you should have it."
Nadia picked it up. The image was simple: a woman's silhouette against a stormy sky, head tilted back, arms open. On the back, in faded ink: What if grief is just love with nowhere to go?
"Thank you," Nadia whispered.
"The rain always stops," the woman said. "But the sky remembers what fell."
The drive home felt different. Lighter, maybe. Or just less heavy. Nadia didn't know the word for it yet.
When she pulled into her apartment complex, Zara was waiting on the steps, wrapped in a blanket despite the morning warmth. She ran to the car before Nadia could even turn off the engine.
"You came back."
"I came back." Nadia pulled her sister into a fierce embrace. "I'm sorry. I just—I needed to—"
"I know." Zara's voice was muffled against her shoulder. "I wanted to run too."
They stood there in the parking lot, holding each other, two survivors of the same storm.
"Did you find what you were looking for?" Zara asked finally.
Nadia thought about the motel. The rain. The face in the sky. The woman who'd stood witness. The postcard in her pocket.
"I don't know," she said honestly. "But I found something. Maybe that's enough for now."
They walked inside together, into the apartment that still smelled like rosewater, where Mama's books still lined the shelves and her favorite mug still sat by the sink. Where grief and love occupied the same space, the way they always would.
Nadia placed the postcard on the kitchen counter, propped against the sugar bowl.
What if grief is just love with nowhere to go?
Maybe that was it. Maybe grief was just love that hadn't learned how to live without its home. But love was patient. Love could learn. Love could find new ways to exist.
Outside, clouds gathered again. Not threatening. Just present. Ready for whatever came next.
And Nadia—raw, exhausted, grieving, but somehow still standing—was ready too.
Some losses never heal. They simply become part of the landscape of who we are. And maybe that's not tragedy. Maybe that's proof we loved deeply enough to be forever changed.
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