Don't forget to say goodbye

You want to make someone love you?

Here’s the secret, get up at midnight, pack your suitcase, hop onto a train and go to some strange place without any final words. Just leave.

Trust me, absence does make the heart go fonder.

I had a rather care-free and self-obsessed childhood, but most of my weekdays were occupied with track training, piano practice and intense amount of homework I had. During the weekends, I amused myself with sliding down stair rails and figuring out how to break into the seemingly empty neighbouring house.

I liked the weekends, because of two reasons. One, I get to visit my grandparent’s house and two, it means I get to see my cousin. I loved the area my grandparent lived here, it had much more homely feel to it than ours. Though theirs was far less luxurious, you can even go so far as to call it shabby. But I felt always felt more at ease.

Their house was tucked away in a small alleyway next to a high school, the sepia limestone walls have dark streaks marking the hesitant progress of time. The entire alleyway seems to live in the past, there was a deep well in front of my grandparent’s house set against a shrub of bamboo.

Though the water was no longer drinkable, it was a keepsake of the past. What I loved was how simplistic it was, compared to the grandeur in our five storey house of king size bed and marble steps. I prefer the white coloured porcelain tiles, and the basket of freshly brought fruits and veggies on the kitchen table.

My grandpa loved to collect stones, so that his bedroom always had a large collection of different stones on display. Though I never understood his fascination with them, I would always sit as he explained the image of a woman, mountain in each of the stones. Then on the third floor, there was room filled with strange objects that my grandpa had collected over the years. I like to bask in the musky air of the room, it was quiet and I felt the passage of time lingering on each of the objects. A story that hides beneath their surface, not waiting to be discovered but simply a subtle show of their value.

At the top, there was a whole storey filled with orchids. Pots after pots after pots of orchids. It stank, and I hated the bloody room because it was covered with a black tarp and for some reasons the orchids creeped me out.

But the best part was lunch time, where my aunty, uncles and cousins came together to eat lunch. Like all grandmas, mine was also an angel in the kitchen. I would sit with my cousin who was one year older than me, and halfway through we’d get up and move together to the TV room and sit. He was one year older than me but somehow, there was no communication needed. We were just a natural pair, after lunch we’d run out and explore the nearby streets.

I can’t remember what we did to amuse ourselves, only that the pleasure of being with someone who understood me without having to explain myself remained. Most of the time, he was the leader of the activities. I followed not because he was older, but simply because it was enjoyable.

We went on a lot of trips together as a family, sometimes to cycle to a nearby mountain where we could have picnics (with the fried chicken wings my grandma had made) and to enjoy nature. Because the nature we see in the city are the sparsely painted trees half coated with smog. We were shadows of each other, at least for me it was. And what happens when shadows separate, they break into space, lost.

But it was much more complicated than that, I found that I missed the effortlessness of our communication. He was like the wind that support my wings, or maybe I was the wind that supported his wings. But I left without goodbyes, with untidy strands blowing in the wind. A question with no answer when there should be one.

So say your goodbyes.