old haunts
August 2022
Your mother says something about returning to old haunts and you are reminded, instantly, that you are nothing more than a ghost on this tarmac. A spectre, searching in vain for divinity through these memories which filter in like moonlight through shutters: all is blurred, and dimmer than you remember, and the paths seem smaller than they were ten years ago. And then you have to stop and suck in a breath of this humid air because it has been a decade, and it isn’t fathomable, because surely the illusion of this place as a home would lose its momentum after so long. Ten years. You do not live here any more. The sun beats through the clouds and you continue, and every step is heavier than the last.
You reach your old address and its sign which has not been altered in all of this time, not one bit changed except for the damp stain running down through its middle — last time you were here you were leaving, six years old and utterly clueless in the back of a black Mercedes. Driving away. You did not know then that it would be ten years until your return. You did not understand the concept of ten years at all: you had not yet lived it. You were so unbearably young. There’s a faint ache in the depths of your chest — under the ribs, tangible and cold — which speaks of the memories that you cannot lay claim to. The neighbours who you can’t recall even remotely: it is warmer here than you remember. The air sticks thick to you like somebody else’s shirt and you want to rip it off so violently that the fabric tears. You have no memory whatsoever of this unending heat.
Some things you recognise — your driveway, for instance, and the surrounding trees — and maybe if you went inside the house it would all come flooding back. Maybe not though. The house has changed: of course it has. Nothing is ever treated with such kindness so as to be allowed to remain the same for this long. There is no deluge of recollections, though, here. The assumption had been, landing feet first on this road which you spent six formative years of your life on, that everything would come rushing back. Finally, the child in you would be free to drop to her knees and sob for everything that was lost — and you would call it vindication. A mouthful of it, like Calpol. Bittersweet. Awful. You were (you are) too young for this.
There is no big moment, though. No earth-shattering collision of innocence and adulthood, no white pinwheels of revelation, or forgiveness. Just the chirping of cicadas in the near distance, and the rumble of a starting engine somewhere down the road. You stare at the house. The sign. The tarmac. You will something to break out of these bonds and tear a hole in your chest and debilitate you with weeks’ worth of childhood grief, and there is nothing. Not even the dullest twinge of déjà vu. No flood: a barren, summer-dried stream. Banks as parched and empty as if put through a kiln, sunlight dripping in spools from the canopy which must have sheltered you, all this time. You wait. You stand unmoving for half an hour at least, and there is nothing, and these patched up wounds cannot mean a victory because there is salt beneath each dressing. This was supposed to be closure. Hair sticks to your neck with the weight of this heat.
Here is what you remember: the pool, and the sand pit. (It was red and shaped liked a crab). The art room, and its classes, and a room with blue walls. You remember some of the garden — the calamansi tree and Soreya’s van. Rose’s house and her room with its TV (you remember this better than your own bedroom) and the porridge she would make you every morning when you ventured across the grass. The black stairs and your parents’ room and its dark wooden furnishings, and their digital alarm clock with its red numbers. More stairs. A playroom and its games, and you remember Connect 4 and Snakes and Ladders. A windowless living room with a thick old TV and a red carpet. The feeling of being in your buggy. One of your brothers’ rooms. The more you think about the layout of this house the more it haunts you, because you remember a bathroom and more doors but you do not know where, or how. You remember a kitchen. You do not know what it looked like.
You do not know what this entire childhood looked like, really, and suddenly you’re being made to face this truth and it blinds you, almost. The minute you can find the strength, you turn around. You walk away. Old haunts. Call it what you want: one way or another, you are a phantom in this neighbourhood. You do not exist, to this new flock of people. They do not know you. They could not put a name to the face of this wraith. The car, blissfully, is only a few hundred metres away, around the loop. Your brother says something about how everything seemed so much bigger here when we were younger, and all you can do is nod. You drive away, forever, for the second time in your life — you will never see this place again. You, the ghost, are going to have to live with that.
