The Day The World Went Away

I'd listen to the words he'd say
but in his voice I heard decay
the plastic face forced to betray
all the insides left cold and gray
there is a place that still remains
it eats the fear it eats the pain
the sweetest price he'll have to pay
the day the whole world went away

That would be November 4, 2007. The day my mother died. On this Mother's Day, I find myself missing the love of my mother as much as I did the day she died. We weren't always as close as we ought to've been, but I like to think that our last couple of years made up for the spaces inbetween.

The song above comes from the 1999 Nine Inch Nails album The Fragile. Trent Reznor apparently was apparently inspired to write it by the death of his grandmother. I heard a remix of it a couple of weeks ago in the long trailer for the upcoming movie Terminator: Salvation. I never thought about it this way before, but the "Terminator" series is something that has followed me from my pre-teen years into adulthood. I've never conceived of any parallel between myself and John Connor, but it's hard not to see one now.

If this struggle of ours is a war, I am merely a foot soldier in it, not a leader by any means. Yet I feel like my mother prepared me for it, the best way she knew how. At the end, Mom told me that she was proud of me, that she loved me. She said that in spite of things, or maybe because of them, I had turned out okay.

Today is Mothers' Day. It's supposed to be a celebration of mothers and motherhood, and here I am slogging through a weird, morbid metaphor about a movie with killer robots. Hey, I've got to write what I know.