Random

It's been a blur. 16 hours over the Atlantic Ocean, 4 days at home, another 17 hours over the old continent and I found myself laughing, eating, hugging, talking and admiring the rain showers that come and go and which i have missed for so long. The same intense embrace of heat and moisture leaves me drenched in sweat everyday, all the while wondering how my cousins can parade in jeans and 2 layers of blouse, plus gloves to protect the arms and mask to hide their face from the sun that seems to burn me darker and darker everyday in my shorts and tank tops. When my younger cousin swung open her hair that reaches her knees I knew I have no rights to complain.






My grandma seems to have become even smaller. Her back a constant question mark about where we have been, when we are leaving and when we are coming back. She seems to draw all her strength from the few days when the family that is away comes back to see her and spends the rest of the time waiting and waiting for us to return again. Her hearing is long gone, so that her world has been trapped in a time and space almost imaginary, which is permanently plagued by the noise of a hammer hitting a piece of metal, day after day.

I breathed in the smell of ripe jack fruits, guavas, longan and so many more fruits and plants and flowers which I sometimes remember and sometimes don't. I relearn the respect for proud cats guarding the kitchen from horrible animals who we must not name, jumping at fish freshly caught and boiled with onion which I have to pull from the garden. Life seems so quiet. Everyday I open my eyes at 4.30 am and walked out on the balcony of a house built in 1991, but which the moisture already colored green at the bottom with moss. Swinging on the old hammock, I watch the silver moon fade away, the stars become less and less bright in the birth of sunlight...