Anatomy of Moving (2/2)

I hate everyone, I think, at thirteen. I love life, I think, at fourteen. I need to get out of here, I think at fifteen.

I’m a little over five, and my scrawny self is cross-legged on the floor, frantically watching my father paint the wall; large, wet, glistening strokes of white washing over my numbers and art and scribbles and love, making space for the next tenant’s child to create stories of their own.

I forget life; I forget the floor and how it held me; the memories of my first home’s corridors blur away, and a white haze of cotton candy and rhymes settles over and carries me into my next home.

My home, where I was an afterthought, tucked into a wall in the drawing room, nooks and crannies sheltering tiny bits of rot and decay that festered over the years, rooms of love and tables with takeaway and warm dinners, the couch that held me when I was sick and the television that walked me through my first video games, and it is quiet, sweet and all things lovely.

I think about the air conditioning and how it smelt of freshly mown grass the first few seconds it was switched on, and the summer breaks I spent on the couch below it with Enid Blyton and mango nectar juice boxes. I think about how my favourite summer break activities were the holiday homework the school gave, and new books and new name slips and tangible objects I could hold and sit with and exist with, and things were slow, present and true.

I’m nine, and it is time to leave, and people ask me if I’m leaving for good, and I nod enthusiastically because mother says we are, and so I say we are too. We’re going to be free, I say. We’re going home, I say. We’re going home, I say, and I look towards a home I have yet to reach.

There are no farewells, only excited chitterings to keep in touch, exchanging our parents’ numbers and inspired packing, a folder for each set of stickers, a carton box for books and more folders for papers and newspaper clippings, and I’m telling everyone of a new home that is coming, of a place where I will have a room to call my own, a place with dogs and life and and freedom, and I tug along, my hands clasped to Mother’s, and I drag my trolley along the bustling airport where people are leaving behind lives and starting new ones.

And my heart breaks a little bit, and I leave a trail of bits and pieces of memories and heart and life, and I turn around to see they’ve all been trampled on, and I sigh, and I hold Mother’s hand tighter because what’s gone is gone, and we’re soaring towards a better life.

I long to go back home and walk its ochre-lit streets and zigzag my way around the benches in the church and sing in the choir with my best friend, who has forgotten me, which is for the best because she wouldn’t recognise me now anyway. I carry scraps of those years like dead soldiers tied to my ribs, and they bob along the roads, an unnatural, unwilling sway only death reckons.

I revisit the past and suck out the little substance those memories hold and pretend all of this is a quiet nightmare that’ll go away when someone switches the air conditioner off. I find myself back in our little flat, where my heart was full and whole, and no one is asking me if I am leaving for good, and I am not lying through my teeth that we are.

I hate everyone, I think, at thirteen. I love life, I think, at fourteen. I need to get out of here, I think at fifteen.

And I sway between euphoria and glaring misery, love and hate, grief and rage, and I am soaked, drowning and lost, caught in a perpetual loop of swirling, unable to hold or anchor myself. I listen to the noises, and I yes my way through it all; there is no opinion, no person, no identity.

I don’t sing anymore, I’ve given up drawing, and there is none of myself that I recognise, and I feed on grades, on academics, on laws and theories that are tangible, that are translated into physical phenomena, and I feed and I feed and I feed until I’m sick and my stomach throbs and my brain suffocates under the sheer weight of the knowledge and the grief until apathy has me in a chokehold and I regurgitate everything for more grades. 

And a decade later, when age has shunned the pain and life has grown around the grief, childhood is but a word. I find a sad, little joy in the act of flitting between lives — unrooted, untethered, homeless.

And just as I begin to believe I have mastered the art of drifting, I am brought to the earth and chained again. People applaud me. They pat my back and congratulate me on growing up, on being responsible, on finding an adult job. All I can think about is the sheer misery of having to rip myself off the ground again. Just as I was beginning to find my footing. Just as I had found a nook safe enough to sit with my legs outstretched.

A nook with walls I could draw on and not be erased. And in spite of it all, the resistance, the fighting, the tears, the rage, the hatred; I am told it is for good. That I am leaving for good.

So I smile and laugh, because the irony is almost too much to comprehend.

People ask me if I’ll miss them, and I look at them and chuckle and think about how I missed with all my heart once upon a time, and it shattered me across ages, and I nod my head and say I don’t know and nod my head and say yes because in spite of all my bravado, in spite of all the rage, in spite of the marvellous irony of farewells, I will mourn and grieve and leave a breadcrumb trail of what’s left of my heart as I walk away yet another time. 

I'm overjoyed and soaked in grief, thrilled and so full of rage and awake and asleep, and the world sees me but pretends to see someone else, and God hears me bawling, but it sounds like sweet laughter to him.

People tell me it’s for the good, and I throw up my grief, coating them in my rage, shards and slivers of empty, unwise words; my rage seeps out, years and years’ worth of a child’s unformed pain, and I drop my cage, and I burn, and I yell, and I seethe, and I wail, and I fall, and they look at me and say I’m a child and this is all for the good. I hope they say the same, as I’m lowered six feet into the ground because I’d believe it then.

[Featured image: By Rembrandt - internet, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6375105]