i hate forgetting that i grew up in a house lined with sunflowers; with tall trees i was always eager to climb, and swings that hosted every kid in our lane. i hate it when the bitter aftertaste of endings and separations; takes away from me the joyous fairs i enjoyed, the numerous cheap toys i hoarded. i hate forgetting that in my very blood, i carry the courage to walk into a dark night. courage; or perhaps another desire that Ammi inherited me. when we chased her into the alley ways shadowed by eucalyptus trees; that sapped the life out of the very soil that nourished them; but today is not the day for that. let me romanticize my fire flies today, those painstakingly collected in our lil jars on those breezy summer nights.
i hate forgetting that my favourite thing about abba growing up was his ability to do a hand-stand. among the many things that were never passed on to me, like the foreign tongues he spoke.
i hate to not acknowledge it enough that he was the one who taught me: faith started with doubt. and that thinking never led you astray, and that the world was big enough to hold all of us. and the ideas we held dear.
i also miss his ranch. one oddly called ‘the well’ after the water body that sustained it. i miss the little bakris, lelis, and all those pretty bhensain with shiny orbs that Ammi would say my eyes resembled. (they don’t)
But my eyes, and all of me, do resemble a woman before me. One with whom I share a rather complicated bond. The mother of my father. Dadi. All of me has some of her.
from long before the estrangement with her which ended as they do; i miss hearing the tale of Adam and Hawa and the shaitan mardood who lured them — a story she’d eagerly tell the youngest bunch of her progeny — in her peculiar cave like room, with the same sense of mystery each time.
and in the vivid remembrance of the tale there is some solace for my aspiring heart: the stories we tell may outlive us, the stories we tell may redeem us, they may someday emit a light so great that it illuminates the shadows we create.
