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Pancakes with my mom.

An ordinary day in an ordinary city, though Columbia, South Carolina never fully agrees on what ordinary is. A place stitched together from contradictions: church bells and tattoo parlors, old money and cracked sidewalks, magnolia shade and rusted fences, country drawls brushing up against dyed hair and late-night music spilling out of small venues. A city still carrying the long shadow of slavery, racism, and history that never really stops echoing, while underneath it all people keep living—creating, arguing, laughing, surviving.

And there we were.

Two people sharing the same blood, seated inside an eclectic small restaurant glowing softly against the gray morning. Not a chain. Not a system. A place with mismatched chairs, walls covered in local art and fading posters, shelves crowded with objects that didn’t belong together but somehow made sense. Goth kids in black boots sat near farmers in work shirts. College students leaned over books. Someone laughed too loudly in the corner. A stranger with bright eyeliner stirred coffee like it held answers. Outside, the world kept moving in all its strange overlapping rhythms.

Nothing extraordinary.

And yet, extraordinary all the same.

Blueberries burst in my mouth—sharp, sweet, alive—reminding me that life can be complicated, but presence is not.

My mother laughed across from me, and in that moment I saw her fully—the quiet kind of beauty that does not ask to be noticed but fills a room anyway. The way I had always admired her, not just for how she looked, but for the way she moved through life as if it had weight and meaning even in its smallest gestures. Her presence carried a comfort I didn’t know how to name; a fragrance that lingered in my memory long after she had left a room, softening the edges of her absence. Even her clothing seemed like an extension of her care, the way fabric draped around her and, somehow, around my sorrows too, as if she could wear them away without ever speaking a word.

My heart, meanwhile, carried the weight of some boyfriend or some temporary story that had convinced me everything was ending. The kind of heartbreak that feels permanent only until enough mornings pass.

Still, there we sat.

Me and my mom.

Two girls, really.

Sharing pancakes while the world performed itself outside our window—politics, ambition, heartbreak, history repeating in different costumes, people building and breaking entire lives in real time.

But inside that eclectic little restaurant, butter melted slowly into warm stacks between two girls who, for one brief hour, wanted nothing from life except coffee, pancakes, and each other.

Outside, everything continued.

But at our table, there was only this.

Me and my mom.

Just me.

And forever.