“You live, you flourish, you
bloom.” The refrain her mother used to sing when she was still a child. In
retrospect those words seemed to belie an admonition of imminent danger- there
was no guarantee that everyone could smoothly ascend from “live” to “flourish,”
and rarely, she thought, could one’s blooming maturity last well after the
tail-end of summer. Musingly she stared out of a dormer window and stretched
her tired back. Ladylike elegance made every woman look like a wooden crane. Her
listless gaze landed on a tree overladen with burnished leaves; so plastic they
seemed that one had the illusion of time finally ticked away to its finality-
life only lived on as a pure artificial image. If so, she refused to become
anything but a piece of cherished memory.
The scenery
from the window remained largely unchanged even years ago. But the difference
of her feeling rendered the scenery throbbed and sizzled, constantly very
restless. Obsession made one’s life a baffling play. Her theatricality was at
that time the most inimitable: hiding behind the façade of complete
imperviousness, she harboured secrets, loved a certain one obsessively yet
secretly, all various extreme emotions forced her to a point of sporadic bursts
of anger and sudden lust for vengeance. But all they could hear was a short,
sardonic laugh, escaped itself swiftly out of her throat like black fume out of
the furnace. He was lured towards her as if hypnotised by the witch’s
incantation. There was no past between them, he knew her not, nor did he recover
his mind to think about the future. His life became from then on a protracted
Present.
They buried
her mother under a tree that they deemed the least noticeable, and he felt
liberated. She was liberated, from the parental yoke that was centuries-old and
ever-tenacious, from the old provincial world that long ago had already
deserted her. Obsession was a mask that was always laughing but never happy. Things
were no longer as they were but obsession underscored the normal aspects of a
changed life. For instance, bathing her hands in a bucket of ice water,
something she would wont to do when her senses appeared inert. How she resented
and dreaded the idea of reliving the commonplaces over and over again! Her
steely flames in her eyes wavered as she recalled the refrain her mother loved
to sing: “You live, you flourish, you bloom.” To live was to break the bondage
of everything; to live was to undermine the potency of remembrance, because
remembrance only brought remorse and pain, and one did not live to suffer. Yes,
life should be a protracted present.
He looked
so beautiful in his death as if life had never touched him. She stared up at
heaven in mock affliction, addressing her original Father in a tone resounded
with histrionic anger: “Why Father? Look what a grand joke you played on him!”
Rarely did her express herself with such unbridled vehemence. The flame
blossomed from her chest a voluminous rose, folds of petals worming their way
towards his body, lavishly licking his wounds with their inflammable tongues.
But he budged not nor let out a faintest moan of agony. Impatiently she waved
the rose away.
Morality
was the universal identity although dredging up unwittingly those yesterdays
did make her sigh sometimes. But she would tell herself that the mysteries of
those yesterdays always remained unaccounted for. Staring continuously out of
the window, beholding a scene that never changed, she was suddenly checked by
an onslaught of conflicting emotions but she quickly closed her eyes, trying to
get pass the phase. No. No fear before impulsion, and shame always came too
late. She volumed aloud her mental voice just to assure herself. Then she
spotted something that trembled beneath the heavy leaves: a bird, seeming to
bring a belated salve. As usual she tried to ward it off with menace but the
bird chirped: “I have nothing to unlearn, I have nothing to fear, because I’m
ever-docile.”
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