How in the dark when my father drove the car, I always knew we’d get where we had to go....
INTROSPECTION
I don’t know why I’ve always been this way. Why I kept checking the side mirror for my mother’s reflection when we went on trips. Why I used to be engrossed in the smell of porridge and drowning noise of morning bulletin while staying at my grandparents’ place. Why I used to anticipate my paternal grandfather’s footsteps after the smell of his cologne reached upstairs when he got ready for work. I don’t know why I romanticised the little things in life. How in the dark when my father drove the car, I always knew we’d get where we had to go. That our house was our home and family meant everything. The way my maternal grandfather set his hair with gel and read the newspaper with meticulous attention. How the words were few, intentions were pure and everything was always wholesome and quiet. Happiness felt like it could be achieved and contentment had a name.
No one was too entitled, or a destitute in that life. All were deserving of love and respect. How my paternal grandmother used to sit for hours telling stories to anyone who stopped by for an errand, all the while the sweet scent of tea brewed in the background. Nothing felt out of place, because everything was loved equally. Nothing was secretive because the veil that my mother adorned was shaping within me a woman that knew, what it means to make it matter. To make the little things matter in this big life of big decisions and huge assets. When the belongings are too many to keep record, and the people who need love and respect become too few.
Suddenly now, when I’m on the road it feels like there’s no place to call home. Even while sitting inside four walls and one window. A window that looks over fields of ripened crops of all that was sown in the winters of past lives. The wind blows and a hiss traverses the air, “do mistakes haunt us in afterlife?”
Now, the mornings feel like a burden and all conversations are meaningless, emotions are calculated and the worth is determined by how much you own. Battles are fought in uneven fields and the odds are always against us. Those who believe in miracles. People like me, who have always been quietly living life, being acutely aware of its finitude, don’t fit in.
We remain as unseen as the wallflowers of a room, noticing everything, doing everything differently, remembering the hurt but smiling anyway. Because we know that it is our saving grace.
