Memories of Myself

I had been cleaning out the basement. The sleeves got snagged on a loose wire and ripped; I yelped half in surprise and half in irritation as I felt the wire digging into my skin. A thin, string-like red line appeared. Taking a step back to loosen the sleeve, I had bumped into the shelf, unbalancing a precariously piled stack of books. A book fell out and slammed onto the floor where just before by head had been. Grumbling about the absolutely wonderful luck I was starting the morning with, I bent to pick the book up – only to be greeted with a face I knew well. A picture of me, laughing, and my head caught in a tight headlock by an equally cheerful boy. I had thought the album had been lost during the recent move. Delight lightened my features as I gingerly touched the photos capturing those years.

He and I attended the same school. Both of us were infamous in our own ways; he as the playboy who had gone through just about every girl there was in the grade and I as the tomboy who was just about the only girl who hadn’t dated him. Slight exaggeration, but that was us: two notorious figures whose everyday joy was in being chased by angry teachers screaming at our pranks. If the guys wanted a distraction to skip class, we were the ones they turned to.

Considering all we’ve done, it’s funny how on recollection most the staff teachers didn’t hate us. Rather, there’s a few faces I could proudly claim would state we were their favorite students. A little studying certainly didn’t hurt. Ah- how young we were then! The daily chores were to be breezed through in a couple hours. The rest of the day was spent outside in each others’ company. We had been together since we were literally babies and we knew the other as much as we knew ourselves. It was the kind of relationship where the others wondered whether we weren’t secretly twins. We had each others’ backs, sharing joys, heartbreaks, sorrows, and secrets.

I turned the page, entertained by once-forgotten memories. There was me, an impish grin adorning my features as I showed off a gigantic worm I was in the process of stuffing into the boy’s bag – he hated worms, you see. Right afterwards was a picture of him smearing mud on my hair while I unknowingly slept – I hated having my hair messed with. Then was a short period where I wouldn’t acknowledge his existence and vice versa. We finally made up the good, old-fashioned way: a fistfight. I chuckled at the memory, forgetting the stinging itch of the string wire cut.

Then the war had come.

Father and brother had been dragged to the front lines. So had the boy’s father. He and his mother came to live with me and my mother. We hadn’t completely grasped what it meant to ‘be in war’. When the radio cackled that our army had ‘engaged the enemy’, our mothers gasped – we were bored and shuffled out of the house and raced to the creek. Later we both cried as we got spanked for worrying our mothers for disappearing like that. All I could think then was ‘But we’ve disappeared loads of times before’. It was all unfair at the time.

My fingers traced the outer lines of the last photo; one of all four of us huddled together. None of us were smiling anymore. Around this time, I had my first real encounter with that horrible existence called ‘Death’. Just days before, a telegram had come, announcing the “noble death” of my brother. He had rushed out to drag a fellow soldier out of the enemy’s range and had died. The fellow soldier had died as well.

His body had come home moments before we took the commemorating photo of our last childhood naivety. My eyes stung even then as I remembered the stilled breath of the corpse. I had still been young then, but even at that age I realized that the stopped could not start again. Oh, how mother had cried that day. How I had cried!

After that day, we never took another photo together. The boy’s father came back crippled and touched on his head. The entire family moved out. The days that followed were of constant terror. Mother grew increasingly weary; she gradually ceased her routines and spent the days sitting in front of the radio, biting her nails both in anticipation of and in horror for any telegram that might enlighten her with news of her husband. Her cheeks hollowed, and though she would feign strength when in my presence, oftentimes she did not notice my being in the room altogether. I think she frightened me more than any “war” did – it felt like the ‘Death’ that had taken brother was taking her away, too. It frightened me when Mother’s blank eyes bored into the lit fire, as if she would be sucked in, a perturbing sight that disturbed my own dreams.

Even though years had passed since those disheartening years, I could not help but shiver. In the end, that war had indeed taken everything. News of father’s death came. Almost immediately mother fell ill. Weeks afterwards, I had become one of the many war orphans.

Gone were the days when I could strut amidst groups of friends and holler out random insults into the air. Gone were the days when I could frolic in the meadows after an imaginary horse. Gone were the days when I and the boy could grin at each other and dream out plans so intricate they were immediately put into play. The short films stored in the album brought back memories – thoughts of whom I had been and who I was presently; thoughts of how my life had shaped me; thoughts of the pains and the joys, the meetings and the separations. All those bygones stored inside this tiny, brittle frame.

The ringing jerked me from the pondering. Gingerly closing the aged leather cover, I placed the memories on the dust-ridden tabletop before bounding up the stairs. As I opened the doors, I looked back once. There lay my childhood, a piece of myself, under a halo of light. Ancient. Welcoming.

The phone rang again.

“Coming!”

#sarahchang #fiction