When Imaginations Run Wild
I. When Imaginations Run Wild
Apparently we can form memories of events we’ve never experienced. Perhaps you look at a photo, one that hangs on your grandmother’s living room wall or the one that collects dust your mother’s nightstand.
They’ll tell you about that photo from time to time. They’ll say it was such a warm, sunny day, or a rainy evening at a Holiday get-together. They smile slightly or laugh to themselves as they recount the good old days for you, and for themselves.
And so, years later, you’ll reminisce on those good old days when someone asks you about “that time when…”. It doesn’t quite matter now that you couldn’t recall them before, but what’s important is that those memories now yours to hold, right?
This phenomenon is why I’ll get confused when I think of you and the time we spent together. Did we really spend any time together? I have to shut my eyes so hard they sting in order to transform your abandoned house into the home that I remember from the photos. I force myself to imagine the heavy scent of hoisin and sesame oil instead of the damp smell of cracked tiles and peeling wallpaper. So I hope you understand that I can’t help but second guess my memories filled with laughter, incomprehensible chatter, and the faces of my older cousins at a time when they were younger than I am today.
It’s a dream. I don’t own my memories, but I have no picture to prove it ever happened. And who else do I have left to ask if it really happened or not?
At the threshold of your doorstep, I try to cling onto these beautiful memories that otherwise couldn’t have existed in the deteriorating walls of your empty home. My home. Our home. How could warmth exist in a place where the curtains were always pulled close? How could you hold me in your arms, feed me, or care for me when all the chairs at your dinner table were broken?
Just like they kept me from you, our memories are held hostage in the walls where someone else lives now and will never know of us.
II. Things That Could Never Change
We are not the same. We’ve lived on nearly opposite timelines. While you raced backwards, I trudged forward; growing up, only knowing half of myself.
We are two completely different people who never really knew one another, but I feel like we’ve finally met for the first time—Properly introduced and understood each other for once.
Why do I feel so much pain when you come to mind? I can’t explain the way my chest tightens or why I cry tears of guilt when I think of you holding my hand on your deathbed.
Could I have been there for you if I was older? Could who I am today have helped you heal? Could I have at least embraced you with some amount of understanding that no one else offered you?
Because I feel your pain now. Our pain may not—does not—come for the same place, but it has brought me next to you again. I know now what it means to live for others, to never live for yourself, and by the time you do live for yourself, to feel like there’s nothing tethering you to the Earth at all.
I don’t blame you. I don’t think I ever have. But I wanted to understand for so long why you didn’t want to see us, your own grandchildren. Why weren’t we ever enough for you to live? Why couldn’t your own family ground you to this world? And yet I know it was all a lost cause when the pleas and negotiations from your favorite child fell on your deaf ears.
I know you loved me. I remember the way you would sit and peel the skin off grapes before letting me eat them. I remember the way you would make me get a blanket before sleeping on the couch. I don’t remember what your voice sounded like anymore, but I can never forget how it made me feel.
I remember your hair. It was black, curled, and cut short. You had high cheekbones, rounded cheeks, and kind eyes. Your eyes always sparkled when you looked at me, and you always smiled at me, even when you were scolding me for running around and down the halls.
It hurts to know that love was not enough for you. But it’s worse now because I know how you feel. I know you were in pain, but I hope you had good days and good memories. If anything, you were still allowed to be happy, even if you were hurting.
original 03.08.21 / edit 10.27.21
