Little Things, Big Things

Listen:

You didn't hear the alarm go off this morning and you're lying in bed, wanting to sleep forever. School's about to start in an hour and the only thing you move is a pyjama sleeve hanging over your bed.

Down the hallway, you hear the fridge open, your lunch coming out in pieces of bread and chicken. Those hands that carry them are ever so invisible to your eyes. You may as well blink and think a machine is doing all this for you, for all the care you had about the world.

When you finally get up, rubbing sleep from those eyes, a lunch box sits on the dining table, waiting for you.

The screaming begins.

Why don't you get up earlier and make lunch for yourself? Why don't you walk to school instead of me driving you up? What's wrong with you?"

It's early morning. The birds have already begun chirping and time ticks away on the grandfather clock. You have enough.

"Shut up! Just shut up! I'm tired of hearing this again and again. I wish you would just leave me alone and let your daughter be!"

There's silence, a slammed door. It rocks the house and sends shudders through the deepest parts of a tired, aching soul. Shattered, a single tear falls.

It lands on the lunch you left behind.

***

At school, you are alone, thinking about the tear. You suddenly wish you were back at home, catching it as it fell. Somehow, you'll walk out into the sunrise and find a patch of earth that isn't grown over by neglect, and you'll let the tear roll into the soil. There, you'll wait, until it grows into a tree of regret, reminding you of one last blow to the heart.  

The school bell rings.

If only you knew why you wanted to do that.

***
In Chemistry, your brain is like filter paper and the memories are like filtrate, dripping down a tube before your eyes. It's easy to think you can stare at them congealing, thinking of better days while the world moves on.

As a jar of salt sweeps by your eyes and the tang hits your nose, you're suddenly dreaming of the seaside that never used to be full of sharks. There's empty sand and swinging palm trees, a golden disc marking sunset and puffy coffee stains in the horizon: the haven you've always dreamed of. In the corner of your eye, a boy is bringing you sand, and you're staring at him with hands outstretched, trying to place his face.

"We'll always be together, you and I," he says as the sand pours through your hands, "And this is where we belong."

Those words; they sound sweet when you're always imagining them. Because now the sand is falling even faster through your fingers, and you're scrabbling ever so hard to hang on to the few grains that are left between the lines. And when you're back in the lab, holding a jar of mixture and looking into those eyes, you know they were never true.

Because salt and sand is just a mixture and it's got to be separated.

***  
But sometimes, salt and sand can combine.

It's when you're with him in a watery mess at the bottom of the beaker that you'll find yourself watching blue trees and yellow walls and trying to see through them. Your lips are silent in the particle-filled void and he's quiet too, trying to look past the markings on the glass.

You open your mouth twice, but the words desert you once again.

He just keeps looking on.

***
A bracelet.
A laugh.
A smile.
Bumping into each other on the staircase.
Always thinking.
Feeling.
Dreaming.

An open MSN conversation window.
Words across the screen.
Advice.
Wisdom.
Thoughts.
Can't stop falling.



Just friends.

And spaghetti on the stove, already cooked by maternal sweat.

***
That night, you try to write. You close the door, shutting out the world and whisper for the words. You hope, after three weeks of silence, they'll come streaming back for your call.

You hear them. They are so close. Little battered things straggling towards your mind, as though breathed out by the stars above and approved by the cloud-draped moon. Little words you've loved all your life, made tender by your serenade, which you can't help but notice.

They don't come.

Instead, you find yourself walking out into the garden, even though the rain is coming down in sheets and you're wrapped in their cold, clammy embrace. You drop to your knees, down to that little patch of earth where you would bury that tear you saw today, and you'll be hammering on the earth over and over again, because everything you have tried to love has slipped from your grasp and all you're trying to do is pick up the pieces.

Now there are voices. Footsteps across the slippery green, racing across the concrete to where you kneel. You try to fend them off, and fingers dig deep into the earth, unearthing crumbly soil that falls through fingers dampening by the minute. The stench of wet earth assails your nostrils and drives you to your feet, away from the hands that are reaching out for you. Run.

The wet stars are the last thing you see before you slip and crash back to the ground.

***
In bed, you're shivering and shaking like an old woman, so much that the bowl rattles in your grasp. Hands stabilise you, urging you to put the rim to your mouth. The first dribbles of soup falls onto your shirt instead.

And you begin to cry.

Before you know it, there's a shoulder, swinging over to let your face bury into it. It shakes as your sobs cascade and everything that you wanted to get off your chest comes streaming out, weeks and months of pain and sorrow and frustration. The fabric is soaked within minutes, but yet your mother does not move. She simply waits, on the verge of tears, until you finish and start drinking the soup again.

"I'm sorry." You say, but yet you know it's not enough. Two words cannot surely compensate for those endless meals, those selfless moments, even the absorption of anger that your mouth inexplicably sprayed in her direction. Two words cannot even begin to cover one inch of that. Somehow, there needs to be three different words, and no matter how hard you want to say it, it does not come out.

"I know." She says, as though she reads your mind, "I know."

This time, the silence felt golden.

***
Laughter.
A warm embrace.
A story told in a rainstorm.
A piano melody in candlelight.
Breathing.
Alive.

From little things, big things grow.