Allison's Archives

My friends and I pinch a flimsy UPSR result slip between our teenage fingers. The year is 2013 and our childhood is coming to a fast end between puberty and high school entrance tests. The last day of school was not unlike the days preceding it, anticlimactic. I thought to myself, even though we will be scattered around the island wearing different school uniforms in a couple of months, we will still be friends for as long as the etches stay in our wooden desks in the back of the classroom. Silly me! Wooden desks can be replaced. And have been.

They say high school friends tend to last the longest. The year is 2018 as I wipe away tear stains with one hand and hold a stack of IGCSE past papers in another in the tight hallway between three classrooms. I know better than to feed into the belief that I will see half of these people again in my lifetime. Plans to leave the island were so quickly drafted up and set in motion. The bell rings for the last time and morphs into the monotonous beep of my car reversing into the college parking lot.

This time I didn’t even get to say goodbye. The year is 2020 and we are unceremoniously locked in houses following a swift national announcement, and the life-size faces I used to sit with in U.S. History II shrink into moving pixels on a screen. I mouth a silent prayer that we might resume our glory days in the land of red, white, and blue. 

I doff my cap in a different red, white, and blue than initially intended. I think about how many times in the past three years I have shook hands with and learned names of and written letters to people who I will never hear from again outside of “happy birthday”s and “happy new year”s. It doesn’t feel that heavy of a burden anymore, to grasp that some people are not here to leave permanent marks on the page of your life. No, it is not their responsibility to help me fill up the page that I normally stare blankly at; but is it not such a wondrous experience that they hoist up alphabets so I might have myriad options to choose from? 

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Many things remind me of you. If not of you then of the time we spent together, the sphere under which we existed. I will smell a scent familiar to the one I was gifted from the drugstore at fifteen, hear a song released a decade ago that we declared our anthem, or stumble across an old photograph whose edges have been scuffed and dog-eared and yellowed. I have so many things to say to you. So many questions to ask. 

You used to count stars in the night sky and now you count calories and protein. You used to run up and down streets with sweat trailing your temple and now you fuss about reaching your daily step goal. You used to break fragile items with a ball and now you are breaking hearts not excluding your own. You used to dash for the field at the first vibration of the lunch bell and now you are crunching numbers and testing formulas. You used to queue for hopscotch and now you queue in a traffic jam listening to the latest political commentary on the radio. You used to jump on the bed almost like you could fly while your favorite jams play and now you jump at substances before entering a music festival. You used to make popsicles and freeze them overnight but now you toss metal spoons into the freezer. You used to race the raindrops against window panes and now you are running a race against all past forms of yourself. Where are you running to? What is the rush? The first tulip hasn’t bloomed and the last leaf of the tree hasn’t fallen and the lake hasn’t frozen over. You’re not late; it’s just the world that’s a minute faster. 

You’ve done alcohol, sex, and substances against your conscience, faith, and childhood dreams. You’ve lingered too long in the morally grey area that nothing is truly vibrant ever again. You’ve done wrong but that doesn’t make you a bad person and your philanthropy is only as good as your arms remain outstretched. There is nothing wrong with you, I promise, but in the back of your eyelids, you see the blurry face of your seven-year-old self smushed against the car window asking why the moon is chasing your car. When was the last time you spoke to the moon and asked for her forgiveness? Or did you forsake her when you realized she was never really chasing you?

You find love in the cracks of dawn and car seats, through the flip of an old phone and a yearbook page, behind closed doors and strip malls only for it to be torn away from your bare bleeding hands and I am sorry. There is only so much you can change about the world; the government might not approve of your feelings, the nuclear family isn’t for everybody, and parental blessings can’t always be passed around like a dish at the dinner table. But you’ve never been difficult to love, you just need to remember to save some love for the person in the mirror. 

You think the solution to your problems is to cut your hair then bleach it three times before dyeing it. To get a tattoo where it hurts the most of a date, a flower, a script, or someone important. To pierce your ears three, four, or seven times. Do you feel like a changed person? How much of yourself can you change before a jury of your younger selves finds you guilty of murder? At what point does the blood stop being your own? 

I should like to peer into your mind, to take a swim in the deep end of the pool. Do you think of the times your mother plated cut fruits for you? Or the time you got soaked helping your father wash his car in the driveway you scraped your knee? Does your toothbrush still sit in the same plastic cup as your siblings’? The night you thought life was going to end but you still woke up the next morning to the sound of eggs and coffee being made (because it was never really going to end, you were just sixteen)? Do you remember when you used to complain about your primary school bag being heavy (now look at the mountain you carry on your back)? You wonder why your cooking tastes nothing like your grandmother’s recipe and it’s because when she makes it, she misses you—do you miss you? When did you stop liking your birthday? When was the first time you hid the truth from your parents? Your first paycheck—what did you spend it on? When you look in the mirror, and I mean really look, do you still see traces of your parents? Did you inherit their sadness or their anger? Or are you lucky enough to inherit neither? Can you recall the first time you learned the piano and how much joy and black and white keys brought you? What about the first time you got on a plane and the way it sputtered before leaving the ground? The lethargy from after-school tuition? The way you would ask for McDonald’s on the way home, well knowing the rice cooker is already steaming. You hoped so much and forgave so generously. I don’t think you do anymore. 

Your first kiss still survives in the crook of your spine. The melody of your mother’s lullaby still hums softly in the silence of your dreams. That first B plus paper you got is still somewhere on this earth. The pages of your favorite childhood book still whisper their stories in the library. The late-night food stall you frequented still maintains the same humidity. The island still awaits you after all these years in spite of the existence of engagement rings, baby strollers, and mortgages. Yes, you can bury a paper in the earth but it will not grow back into a tree; I can put you back in your cradle but you will not regain your innocence. There is so much you will be but you have forgotten so much of who you were. You remember the pain but not what caused it. You remember the words but not your handwriting. You remember the scent but not the flower. You remember the fear but not the reason. You remember the destination but not the journey. But when all is lost, I remember your name and your face. 

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All at once, I am: blowing out candles on my house-shaped birthday cake in kindergarten, crossing the finish line of the three-foot race in primary school, steadying my shaking hands before I walk up my high school stage for an elocution competition, analyzing how Alanis Morissette’s song “Ironic” is more pure bad luck than irony at the World Scholar’s Cup, running across college campus five minutes before a committee event is supposed to begin, in the car on the way back from IELTS stopping at the gas station to get Tealive, finishing up my shift at the burger joint to be picked up in my friend’s car with the aux blasting, unrecognizing the numbers on the weighing scale after weeks of crying before I had to leave for university, bowing on stages and before podiums with a microphone in my hand, losing every sense of my identity in a London studio that teeters on the brink of two zones, snapping my ankle during winter holiday, learning how to walk again love again live again, doffing my cap at graduation.

I hit +60. I hit +44. I hit +1. I hit +61. The tone rings and crackles as loud as your laughter. Pick up the phone. I have not forgotten. There is not yet anything to mourn. I still miss you.