My mother has a habit of stopping and stooping over to mourn every smashed flower she sees on the sidewalk, and if you try to ask her why, she will purse her lips and stand up with a sharp inhale, open her mouth twice, and quickly walk away, giving you your first lesson in how to be a perfect stranger : never say anything that ends with a question mark. My mother still owns every single pair of baby shoes that she spent her youth chasing with her dainty, friable feet. She says that they remind her that the smallest of things in life are the only things that matter, and the only things that fade as quickly as time fades, and in the end, you are only lucky if they leave a few memories for you to curl up with in the night. My mother stopped buying expensive diaries the night my brother was born. Her lips are bruised with the weight of sleeping novels that gather dust inside her mouth, but she'd rather spend all her nights singing lullabies to help her baby sleep, than writing poems to help herself sleep. My mother raised herself to be an artist, but now she strays away from the paint section in stationery shops and pretends to not know the difference between red and crimson when I ask her what color the dying sky was the evening she wed my father. She shakes her head as though it wasn't just the sky that died a crimson death that day, it was the artist inside her too. A mythical legend that only colors inside the lines now and walks like her feet are stuck within a stencil. A thing that ends with a question mark. A smashed flower on the sidewalk.