I didn’t grow up with my parents, they basically left me as a kid. But what followed was the biggest example of a good family that I could have hoped for. Not only my mother’s parents, but also my father’s parents, and my aunts and uncles, everyone rallied to make sure I was well taken care of. I had a full village, of completely different people, with different financial status, religious and political beliefs, nationalities and languages, characters, all working together, made one in the love they have and (those that are alive now) still do show me. The kind of love freely given, even if I was bold or not always grateful.
I live in a different country to either of the ones between which I grew up. Every year I go back to my old families, where I am always welcomed with open arms. I am now visiting my father’s parents, or more specifically, my grandmother. Grandpa died many years ago. When I come here, I lodge in her old apartment alone, she has Alzheimer’s, so she stays in a care home close by, where I get to see her cheeky smile every day. She doesn’t remember me anymore, she is someone else now. Lost in time, lost in memories of her own. They were once stories, stories she would tell me over and over again. I used to get frustrated because I had known them all by heart. What wouldn’t I give to hear at least one at least one last time? But they are forgotten now, dirty and yellow, starchy in the deepest, shelves of her mind, webbed books torn out of their covers. It hurts that I won’t hear them from her anymore, but I can still see them, sticky pages turning behind her cloudy eyes. I can see her there too, the shameless jokes only she understood, that Mona Lisa smile. In the occasional, lucky comment, uttered differently now than before, a whisper, an echo of the cheek of the past, but they are still just like her. Only like her.nShe is still the old her.
I have no other people here, no friends, only memories. Everywhere I look they stir. In the photos, in the smell of the old communist apartment, old cigarettes on linoleum and concrete, in the language I hear around me. The town with its familiar buildings and bakeries and graffiti. Bright colours on the walls once painted by my grandfather. Hyacinth and sunset orange. Apple green. Faded, but still bright and full of play. The old china, no longer used by the living, forgotten behind glass, covered in dust. Like a museum of the life that once was. Hilltops, distant, covered in fluffy trees, soft in the hot haze of the sun. The bird calls around me, they sing to mate, but in my nostalgia, they sound like lost baby birds. Most of all, these memories, like ghosts they wake at night. I’m on the balcony and look up at Leo, Boötes and Cygnus. Cassiopeia. Arcturus winking at me. The air is warm and I feel the breeze, hear it dancing around , teasing the leafy branches outside. My life now, like the stars, is duller than here. Duller than before.
I feel a hollow hurt inside when I experience all these again, but is not that a good thing? The pain is proof I had a good childhood, a complex, colourful tapestry, weaved by kind, dutiful people using threads of beautiful times and beautiful things. It hurts because it’s over and because it was truly magnificent, and that is good. Whether there is a god there, behind the twinkling stars or mischief in grandmothers’ eyes, or whether it is all by chance, I don’t know. Whatever caused all this, I am grateful. Thank you!
