Some memories |
My family has always praised me for my memory. I’m not sure what’s my first memory, but I do remember lots things. I remember my baby tub and its pastel colours. Pink, yellow, blue. I remember being two and having my ears pierced. I cried. I’m not sure if it hurt or if I cried ‘cause I was nervous. My first pair of earrings were made of gold with a pink coral circle in the middle. They were cute. I remember my first bike. I was five when my grandma gave it to me. It was my sister’s old bike, which had been kept in a storeroom at my grandparents’ summer apartment since she was a kid. It was red and had stickers on it. I once drove it directly into a wall. Why? No idea. I don’t remember my first day of school. But I remember the cushion I used for nap time. It was old and ugly and I loved it. I remember my best friends mocking me for wearing similar clothes everyday and because my home was always messy and full of papers that my father read for research. I remember that when I was six my mom swallowed a whole tablet of sleeping pills. We thought she had gone to the cinema with my sister, but then I found her sleeping in my sis’ bed. I slept in my brother’s room that night while my father took her to the hospital to have a gastric lavage. I remember the kids running away from me at break in school. They said it was just a joke and that I shouldn’t take it seriously. But I spent days and days alone ‘cause every time I came close to them they would ran to the other side of the playground. I remember my cousins pulling my hair and mocking me. And I remember painting my grandparents’ walls and blaming them as revenge. I remember my mom talking on the phone with a friend in front of me and telling her that she had threaten my father with divorce. I remember him trying to talk to her while having lunch some months later and her snapping and telling him he was a son of a bitch. I remember my grandfather taking out his dentures and pretending it was a magic trick. Just a few years later he wouldn’t remember who we were. I wonder if that will happen to me as well. I remember getting home when I was twelve and no one being there. When my parents arrived they told me my carer’s daughter, who was like an older sister to me, had died in a car crash. Her two-month-old baby was on the back sit. He survived. My carer left us after 10 year living with us. I remember sitting on the living room floor, holding my dog to prevent him from walking into my parents’ room, where the paramedics where trying to resuscitate my father. They didn’t. I remember my 23-year-old brother coming home afterwards and being the one to call all our family to tell them. I hugged his leg while he told them and he petted my head. I was fourteen. |