My writing has taken a turn lately. Well lately being starting late August, and unfortunately it's dried up again.
It's a lot more personal, a lot more raw and emotional than it used to be.
Which is always good.
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You say that your favourite flower was the sunflower. When I laugh lightly and ask why, you say sadly with your eyes that it reminds you of your mother.
You were a troublesome kid. Or at least your father tells you. Your relatives used to agree and tut in unison while your mother tried to make you sit straight as you squirmed uncomfortably on the chair, tugging at the pretty lace they put on you. They called you the mischievous one you tell me and I can't help but smile. You still are.
Childhood is a paradox for you. That particular shade of nostalgia surrounds it, because you know, it's childhood, yet it's dirty. Dirty with the sounds of beatings and shoutings; punishments of mirrors, lectures of fidelity and the like. You were happy, but it doesn't make you happy to know now. It's all tinged for you, with the hintings of the invisible, hidden motives and meanings, and hidden powers threatening to encroach on your life.
Hidden strings that you still have to try to bat away. It's a childhood that you still long for though, because it didn't slip away through the years. She died didn't she? The childhood you, somewhere amidst the death, the confusion, the tenderness and the lack of it. Maybe it was when everyone became a lot nicer out of sympathy, and never stopped. Maybe it was the way no one spoke a word of Chinese again. Maybe it was when your father, tried to pick himself up and uprooted the family to another land with another woman.
If that wasn't it, maybe it was where you lost your first kiss, to someone who didn't treasure it as much as you did. Or maybe it was when you realised you didn't care that much about it anyway. Maybe it was when you darkly gave yourself to someone who everyone blamed, and refused to believe that it was your fault at all. It was gone by the time you found yourself alone in your room, day after day, writing powerful missives of hurt to no one in particular. Mutilated when your father, always so strong, broke down and tried to find in you a confidante, because maybe to him, you reminded him of her too much. All before you were fifteen.
You call her stupid. The earlier you. It does puzzle me because when I see a father burst into the bathroom and find his little girl sitting there with a dull metal blade, it's not stupidity I see.
And that's the thing I guess you're looking for, that time far away where you were once, as your mother wrote in a diary you attacked voraciously, "not very bright". Before the flows of hurt came and swept everything away. And maybe, they still linger around. I've seen the flash of hurt in your eyes when nothing you do is ever enough. I see that same flash in the eyes of the girl who struggled to master her ABCs by the age of 1 while her mother threatened and administered beatings.
But you still miss her.
I guess in the same way, it's what I look back on too. You don't really understand, but maybe you will like this. I choose to look back to the time before everything was swept away, when there still is a you in the present. A time where you say, and not where you have said.
That's why my favourite flower is the sunflower, it reminds me of you.
