There was a sandbox in the backyard of my kindergarten. On the many grains lay plastic castle and crab molds, a red bucket (or was it blue?), and a blue shovel (or was it red?). Forgive the inaccuracies; my childhood no longer remembers me or the sweat on my brow under the younger-than-noon sun; it has been eighteen years since my mother’s Perodua Kancil pulled up at the front gate and my Hello Kitty backpack bounced against my back as I clambered into the backseat.
I have never been a fan of sand grains between fingers and toes, but the sandbox was the best place to make friends. The easiest, in fact. It was difficult to maintain a conversation when you were zooming down a slide, vacillating on a swing, or teeter-tottering on a seesaw. No, you sit in the sandbox without fear of dirt and build wonders with your bare hands. Whoever joins you does so of their own accord and leaves the door open for a conversation.
What do five-year-olds talk about? It escapes me. But it has to be easier—communicating as children. There was no right or wrong thing a child could say for there were no expectations of behavior and language, no burden of adult judgment. You would say your names, shake your tiny hands, and play with the sand. So many things are easier as a child because everything that seemed permanent was temporary. Destruction could be forgotten as soon as you fit the sand back into the mold. What is lost can be regained, regained, regained.
It also escapes me what twenty-something-year-olds talk about in the face of someone new. Somebody new. The thought of somebody else is terrifying. What if their name does not sit right on my tongue? What if there is nothing original to be found on my being? I miss the comfort. I miss it so. But my comfort has changed her name, erased her number, and skipped town.
In the past two weeks of spring’s arrival, I have buried hatchets deep enough that hellhounds can’t sniff out and planted seeds that are blooming through un-arable soils. The days grow longer and so do my nights. There are flowers on my desk and I catch myself kicking my feet like a schoolgirl more times than I care to admit. I still gaze upon the map of where my hatchets rest, but the longing to dig up the past and thrash gardens is gone.
But blooming is more tedious an act than most dare to answer to. It is difficult to feed into the belief that beautiful things come to be so through suffering. Is there a conscience to beauty? Where does it lie?
Nowadays, I sit cross-legged across tables and screens and feel the nauseous need to regurgitate my life story. I justify every part of myself as if I have not yet earned the right to simply exist. This is why I have an American accent. This is why my friends are trying to stave me off my habits. This is why I don’t drink coffee. This is why I shut down when voices are raised. This is why making mean fried rice is an accomplishment to me. This is why politics, philosophy, and economics. This is why I write. This is why I am applying for this job. This is why you can’t walk me home. Here, look at everything I have bent over backward for, for your praise, for your validation. You will say I do it all so naturally as if it is a compliment instead of a testament to the masks I have needed to wear. Tell me you see something in me that I do not see in the mirror. Cross-check every intangible quality and inch of my skin with your grading rubric and assign me a score. Want and need me enough, to the point where you are tempted to tell me whether you believe in consulting the stars and about the slopes of your childhood town. Want and need me enough to offer some semblance of permanence and certainty for the next five years. Want and need me enough to see past the sadness of my mother and the regrets of my father. Tell me I will be back. Tell me you will wait. Meet me on the same page and teach me something in a foreign language; I will not understand you, but I can hear the pain in your voice because that same pain survives in my throat. Give me the key to peer inside your head and tell me about the dreams you would give up the world for; you can change the locks when I am gone. Together we might not nurture a full-bloom garden, but we can conquer the weeds.
The conversation grows heavy to no one’s fault and you ask me where I have zoned off to. I cannot tell you the truth. I am waiting in a restaurant I cannot leave. I am sitting in that car again, crying again. I am standing in a classroom and a familiar name is scratched into the desk. I am lingering in the music room where a guitar hangs. I am lying on a hill under a drizzle and there is a beer can lodged in my removed shoe. I am dancing alone in the hall where my hand was dropped. I am on the back of a motorcycle I do not know who is driving. I am throwing my head back laughing on a park bench next to the stupid place I worked at. I am shaking on the stage searching for only one pair of eyes in the audience. I am sprawled in the kitchen light in a shirt too big to hold me. I am in the sandbox again, learning how to speak to you and show you my upturned palms.
My love is salted to taste but nobody knows this. You can’t see me adding pinch after pinch. I reinvent myself to maintain some modicum of relevancy. I compete with the ghosts of his past that cling onto the nape of his neck, and versions of my past selves that I had buried with my own two hands, the soil still tucked underneath my fingernails. My fingernails. My hand. My arm. His arm. He shoved his arm down the length of my throat to rip out my heart. He could have gone with the much simpler route of plunging into my chest, but he wanted to leave an impression. He wanted me to remember so that every time I speak or swallow my words, his imprint remains. You cannot know me to my bones without learning his name; my very own circle in hell. Even a ribcage can become a prison if you see it so.
I surrender my stories as an offering, as if to say, teach me how to earn your forgiveness before you teach me how to keep your attention. I will trample on sandcastles you’ve built for me. I will try to add a moat and dissolve your creation. I will disappoint you; if not today then a fortnight from now; if not in a fortnight then when my fear catches up to me and I run without reason.
But before my fear catches up to me and asks for my hand in an undivorceable marriage, I can be anything. You can fit me into any mold and demand that I be complicit in all your crimes. You can salt my love to taste and water me down as you see fit. I am maiden, mother, and crone. I am apple, snake, and Eve. But I warn that you do not mistake my obedience and willingness for something docile. I am not without reason as my fear is. Should you not be careful, I will turn to quicksand. The murder weapon cannot also be the antidote. I will not save you. I cannot save myself.
The world is too large for me to stay in a sandbox. I say I don’t like deciding but, god, that does not mean I don’t like having options. And that does not mean I only deserve leftovers. If I could build sandcastles with my bare hands, then I could swallow every grain of sand to expand the hourglass in me until the day I do not ask anything of you. Until I no longer have to salt my own name to someone else’s taste.
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