Two homeworks and bathroom meditation

I have been waiting for twenty minutes now, according to the ancient clock on the shelf. Waiting for him to get out of the bathroom where he usually goes to "try and figure things out", or at least that's what it used to be. Pictures on the table look out of place, I'll leave them for later when I'm even more bored, though. What would he possible need me for, years after we decided to ignore that either and/or both of us together ever happened.

I remember seeing him for the very first time and thinking that something about the way his hair falls on his face so haphazardly reminds me of the my paper-eating cousin. The idiotic cousin, specifically, who got food poisoning after eating my math homework in middle school as a way of punishing my dog for having "pooped" on his writing homework that took hours to finish. My dyslexic cousin who spent hours reading postcards, how he mourned that little homework, and how I laughed!

Of course, I couldn't have gone unpunished for that. In fact, I was punished for years! My mother decided that I was too evil to exist around other, beautiful, innocent children and decided to keep me behind the bars of homeschooling. I was encouraged to write by my teacher who begged me to say anything just so he knows I do know how to speak at 13. Anything extra-ordinary in happening is a call for me to go to an empty room, or even the bathroom, and write and whine about how other people's lives can be fascinatingly normal and naturally smooth rather than my life that always remains one-eyebrow-raising in every moment of its passing.

The fact that he circled his uncle with a red marker in that picture is frightening. These pictures, if i remember correctly, are a family legacy. His dad still had teeth in that picture and mom was so-- alive.
He always felt guilty for having out little engagement gathering, not even a party, only a year and half (yes, 18 months) after his mother moved to heavenly spheres.
For laughing inside, I always thought maybe he's giving his mother time not only to process the fact that she's dead but also the fact that he is thinking of marrying the girl whom she always thought was a boy when I was invited to his house on weekends. It was not until that weekend when he dared me to wear heals that his mother stole a moment when he was in the bathroom to gave me the most smiley look of dismay.That, of course, was after they had a little talk in which he explained I was "female" all along.

I can hear flushing. I guess meditation time is about to end. I sincerely do not wish to know what is going on with him, let alone be here. It's too late to runaway now, not before I pay for my dinner-driving-away-as-if-nothing-happened tragic departure.

(to be continued)

One aunt and 86th grandmother

My first impression of the room was that it's badly lit. The furniture was mostly dark and the yellow lighting and yellow walls did not make it easier, any of it. Then there're these antiques that have a museum feeling to them, and even though they were clean and shiny, they felt dusty and rotten from the inside like these yellow walls.

I hadn't seen him in quite a long time ever since that time at his grandmother's house when, in the middle of a silent dinner jeweled by plainest silverware, his aunt dropped dead after having laughed too much to kill certain silences that were only to kill her sooner. And then, on the busy plate which she had arranged very carefully, her open mouth dug a deeper hole into the family that already formed a well-wormed apple. Grandmother, of course, started laughing with/at the now-dead aunt, the rest of the aunts screamed and ran towards her, the uncles stood still staring at one another depending on the seating order. The kids that were sitting at the other table continued eating as if they're trying not as hard as they can to show dead-aunt they have learned all her jokes. At the other end of the table, in my own silence, I needed a picture in my head to remind me of how the fiancee meets the whole family in the grandmother's birthday in a much more well arranged world. I heard his steps walk out, I followed him, taking time to process at least his steps. He wasn't there. And so, I drove home and forgot numbers and letters that refer to him.
I put the things that have his smell or feel in the corner to an empty room in the house.
And I moved to another place.

Remembering this I realize that this room of the house must be decorated by one of the screaming aunts. In a wooden-gold-painted-frame there's a picture of a girl I can recognize as one of his cousins. She must have been around 12 when the laughing dinner incident occurred. How she fought to be on the dinner table with the 'adults' and how easily she lost!
He said in his letter that she's top of her class and has dreams to work as a doctor and go abroad for masters and be successful and this and that. Yes, he definitely changed, he was never even the shadow of a father figure to anyone but himself, at times, and to random strangers who asked for directions! He also said in his letter he "need[s] help with something that only someone who cares but does not know [him] well at the moment could help [him] with." Like many other instances he has left me here to wonder.

(to be continued!)