the scent of saline
air filled the room
and pooled about
my eyes.

So many ways to convey tears. Even in poetry, we seem to shy away from flat-out saying so.

And this piece is so fitting your your mother, who is always there. An undead vampire, someone who is invited in, greater than life as a phantom in an empty opera house.
Someone who is always there, haunting your life, not necessarily in a bad way, but always there, just out of the corner of your eye.

She rattles about your life, as she rattled about in hers. Worrying things, making noise, leaving markings.
And the clinging to the past that she symbolizes. To her days of living, and to her disappearing, in your life. And to her own childhood in hers.
She is the symbol of looking backwards, in this poem. In her life. In your life. Past her death.

And always there, whether quiet, or loud. She sneaks up on you, as a memory, as a presence left behind. And then she comes crashing down, loud and unable to be ignored.
Before departing again.

A poem of contradictions. Of the young becoming old, of the powerful becoming frail.
A poem about growing up, and the ways memories are immutable, yet change as you do.