Memories

Maroon 5 — Memories (Lyrics) — YouTube

It had been twenty-four years since she’d last seen it, but the place looked exactly the same. She slipped the curtains on the windows open, and watched with the slightest furrow in her eyebrow as particles of dust danced on the rays of light.

And then she smiled.

She turned slowly to the trolley on the side. The wheels were rusting, and they made a squeaking sound before deciding that they wouldn’t budge for her. A little sigh escaped her, as she thought of how she would’ve screamed had the same thing happened a couple of decades ago.

Now, she only placed her hands on it heavily. Her fingers passed through a phantom memory of a photo frame.

The first time they’d entered the new house, it’d only been she and her husband. They used that tiny key with an engraved elephant on the side to open the front door, and as soon as she’d stepped in and taken a breath of the musty air, she’d fallen in love with the place.

Of course, then, she’d announced that in a week the place would be unrecognizable, filled with every variety of flowering plants that would breathe fresh oxygen into the place, with a lovely sofa and soft carpet, and not to mention a clean kitchen where she could cook delicious meals and let the scent waft through the house.

True to her word, when her parents came over to visit the next week, it was all praises for the efficient husband and the wife with the good eye. How beautiful the house looked! They’d taken a photo then, the four of them, to commemorate the start of a new life in the new house.

Later, they had chole bhature and gulab jamun for dinner.

Now, her mouth tilted up in another smile, one that remembered how it had been at the start, the excitement of a fresh start, the hope for a wonderful future.

She lifted her hands from the trolley and gave it another push. It stubbornly stayed in place. Huffing, she muttered a ‘do what you will’ to it and looked up from the trolley to the wall behind it. It was impossibly full — with pictures, medals, embroidery, plates and whatnot.

First were the printed photos of her and her family. Her eyes skimmed over numerous faces, smiling, laughing, crying faces, even one of her son as a baby with his comically horrified face at whoever was behind the camera.

She remembered that one clearly, as if it had happened just yesterday. Her older daughter had dressed up as some villainous character — from some popular show at that time whose plot line she could never follow, why did it matter if birdman or steelman or whatever didn’t ‘exist in the same universe’, they were both heroes, weren’t they? — and her younger son, who’d just watched it and was extremely scared turned out to be the perfect person for her to test out her Halloween costume on.

She rubbed her thumb against that picture for a moment, and then moved it to the other ones. Every one of them brought forth a memory in her mind, right from when she was 15-years-old and learnt too late that Coca-Cola was actually a despicable, vile tasting liquid that did not deserve to exist, to when she was 50-years-old, and posing for a photo with her granddaughters and grandsons.

Once she’d had her fill of the pictures and had pressed the few of them back whose double-sided tapes had lost their stickiness, she ran her fingers through the silkiness of the medal collars and porcelain prizes hanging on the wall.

Some of them were her own, as a memento for her years of teaching and working and some of them were her husband’s, rewards of his own hard work while he had still been working. Looking at them again after so many years sent a rush of pride through her.

The others were her kids’, from awards won for outstanding art pieces to congratulations for becoming the CEO. She wondered if she could still call them her ‘kids’, because they were already nearing their own fifties. Then she laughed, noticing one of the awards titled ‘World’s Best Mother’ — it looked so legit that she’d forgotten it hadn’t been a real award. They would always be kids in her eyes.

When the kids had moved out, they had gone with them, to live in Singapore. For some reason, she had refused packing all the objects hung on the wall, insisting that they’d add new things in the new house. Maybe she’d known even then that she’d come back here one day, and she’d want to see everything as it was before.

She’d moved along the length of the wall, and found herself face to face with a shelf. The racks were empty, but she could see them filled as they had been before — with hand-painted plates and cups, decorative fans bordering the arrangement and several wall hangings stuck to the sides.

When she’d first started buying pots and little diyas, everyone assumed that it was to make food or for the upcoming Festival of Lights. Delightedly, she gathered up all the paints and brushes in the house and went off to an isolated room to start painting. The results had been amazing, and she even made a special few to send to her relatives. She’d had so much fun then, with her mother and sometimes her daughter, deciding on which paints to use and what designs to apply.

She swept a hand through the lower rack and sighed when her fingers came out coated with dust and cobwebs. Shuddering a little at the thought of possible spiders, she moved away from the shelves and turned around to… nothing.

The rest of the place was empty, no furniture in sight, only the dust particles still dancing in the sunlight, no doubt with a number of more friends from her moving around the place.

As she stared at nothing, more memories came up to the surface. These weren’t the happy sort like before, no, they were the ones which had all the arguments and fighting. Seventy-nine years, of course she’d have had her share of conflicts, she supposed.

Surprisingly, even though particularly unpleasant memories of shouting came up, she realized she didn’t care all that much now. They all seemed like things of the past, fights over petty things like which dress she wanted to buy to fights over heavier stuff, but still, things of the past. They had all been from so long ago, and all of them had long since been resolved, so she found that they really didn’t matter.

Maybe she’d even learnt something from them, or the other person had learnt something, whatever it was, everything was fine now, years down the line.

She hobbled past all the nothing and went back to the window. There she sat down on the wooden rise, looking outside. She allowed herself to stay there for a long time, until the rays of light turned orange and then red and finally what seemed like the night set upon the place. What passed through her mind, whether memories or thoughts about the weather or what was going to happen next, we don’t know, for you can never know everything about someone else’s mind, but when she rose, she had a contented smile on her face. She made her way out of the place, closing the door shut behind her.

She missed this place, yes, but coming back had satisfied her, given her enough to think about for the next few days, and even though some part of her wanted to stay in the moment forever, she remembered she had to let go, and that she also needed to check how the plants in the garden were doing after all this time and suddenly that was all that mattered.