This series is inspired by the attempts to study Wordsworth’s Prelude Book 1 and the resulting introspection and reflection upon my own vivid childhood experiences.
The glowing squares emptying themselves into the night look like giant robots crying. It is awhile before bedtime, so the fluorescent lights in other family’s bedroom, or living room, still watched over their lives in the HDB flat I can see from my bedroom window. The bedroom had once been two separate ones, but the wall between had been removed and it was like a bottle capped loosely, the orange light from the room closest to the door leaking and pooling at the spot I had chosen to stand in.
Behind the window, I watched the wall of tiny compartments of life from the warm darkness, left the lights switched off because science: one could see the light clearer in a dark environment. I stood in a queer contemplative mood, waiting for something, ready to retreat from the world and observe it through unblinking eyelashes. The robots are crying and their tears don’t roll down their cheeks; they gradually dissolve into air and softly, the entire HDB building trembles with a strange, moist glow.
I push my face up against the off-black window frame. There were two grooves in the bar that my forehead rests on. I could feel cold stripes seeping onto my face where the metal was cold, burning.
For the first time that I can remember, there, branded with cold metal bars and contemplating in the orange darkness, I thought of what I would do if my mother died. The thought of death came after my chest ached with the random, completely unexpected swell of love for her. It was the kind of love that hurt me physically. I imagine the ache felt like watching a tree that had stretched its fingers towards the universe for ever and ever and before me it started splintering and crushing its own trunk, as if it was keeling over from the weight of holding up the dome of stars above its branches. Honestly, what would I ever do if my mum died?
I ran over the kind of pain and white blindness that would ensue. I imagined her death always occurring before me: me clutching to her as she lay drifting to sleep at a scene of accident. Me crying and dying a hundred times over but I keep coming back to life alone. I ran over the kind of pain I would be in, inflicting the pain of it over and over, as thought it happened, as if I was combing through knotted hair, over and over, trying to smooth things out, muster my best response.
I don’t want my mother to die.
Trying to unsaddle myself from the intense and primal and irrational fear, I repeat that wish.
This was my first time crying without telling anyone.
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