(i) strange maturity
I turned 40 a few days ago. As I spend half the day at work, a sneaky detour to an old bakery for a sugar donut, headed home to lie in bed with my child and bringing her out for a walk like any other day. I ended the night the same, watching something before bed with my partner when it dawned on me that for the first time in ages, there’s no darkness-smoke pouring out from the pit of my soul. No “I am not worthy to be alive” or “I am too difficult to be loved” soliloquys amplified and racing in my mind weeks prior to the day. No emptiness so deep I become blind by it. Instead, there is this feeling of wholeness as though my age have finally caught up with me.
If y’all been here a while, you’d know birthdays are especially a hard period for me. It is when my seasonal depression peaks and spirals in its most cruel manifestation. And it tends to happen every fucking year. On a different tangent altogether, I had kept this typewritten quote I picked up from a bookstore in my notebook:
“We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.”
―Anais Nin
The quote sits between the pages of my notebook and almost like a ritual, I take it out, feel the paper as it ages, read it to myself and place it back into the bookshelf. Birthdays are hard for me for many reasons. However it dawned on me, with sudden clarity, that it’s because I never truly felt truly my age and that my experiences, unlike most, are not linear. At fourteen, something traumatic happened to me and I have remained fourteen. Trauma is not a singular point. Rather it is more like a wave, or a current and it bleeds onto everything that comes after. I was fourteen for a really long time but I was also forced to adult, parentified immediately after. And between that point and somewhere after that it became fucking messy.
I spend the whole of my twenties in a peculiar daze and repressed that fourteen year old self so deep into my core, that it turned so quickly into this monstrous thing with reckless outbursts and what always followed after is the parent self, indifferent and unloving pushing me forward into strange maturity. I flipped and flopped between the two, usually with dire consequences, without having space to truly feel the age I’m at. If there was ever such a thing to begin with.
Yet now entering into my fourth decade, doing the work of nurturing my fourteen year old self and growing comfortable with being an actual parent, I feel finally freed from the tricks of time. The flip flopping is lesser now and in its place is a knowing sense that this is where I’m supposed to be.
Ah how blissful it is to be alive right now. What a sweet thing it is.
And yet I am deeply thankful my child self remains wilful and my parent self have protected me all these years.
(ii) “…as if they were going back in time…”
“نَوَيْتُ صَوْمَ غَدٍ عَنْ” he said smoking his last cigarette before Imsak and I echoed loudly after “نَوَيْتُ صَوْمَ غَدٍ عَنْ”, belly full of water and French toast, a beached whale on our patterned floor, “أَدَاءِ فَرْضِ شَهْرِ” I am in bed, vaping the last minutes down and taking a final gulp of water. My balcony light is orange as it was in my childhood kitchen if the switch was flipped twice up and once down. He would have been by the window, on a chair but I could never locate myself “أَدَاءِ فَرْضِ شَهْرِ” echoes my head in his voice, its timbre, the way he enunciates شَهْرِ and reminded me that it was my grandfather’s name. رَمَضَانَ هَذِهِ السَّنَةِ لِلّٰهِ تَعَالَى, I left his house on Ramadan, no longer daughter, no longer child and yet he returns every Ramadan somehow, lesser as father each time and more as a memory that refuses to die.
What is the mortality of a memory? Why do we, time-travellers, always land upon the same ones, (at least for me) the ones from childhood. And somehow interlinking to other memories, similar somewhat but not as striking, caught fast like electricity moving in a circuit or some brain category thing like files from the same folder. A trigger to a bloom to Medusa hissing heads and then a sudden return before a trigger sets the departure into motion and off we go again, reluctant time-travellers.
I think of the warty comb jelly or Mnemiopsis leidyi; a jellyfish with an oval-shaped and transparent lobed body, with four rows of ciliated combs that run along the body vertically and glow blue-green when disturbed. Much like the immortal jellyfish, the Mnemiopsis has the ability to reverse its lifecycle as an adaptive mode of survival. That means, under circumstances of starvation or stress, the Mnemiopsis is able to age backwards and preserve itself.
‘Sixty-five adult warty comb jellies were isolated in tanks without food for 15 days, after which Soto-Angel and Burkhardt fed them a leaner diet once a week. The gelatinous lobes that M. leidyi develop to signify adulthood began to be reabsorb into the specimens’ bodies, and after several weeks, 13 of the 65 specimens had reverted back to both the physical appearance and dietary habits of a typical larva.
“Witnessing how they slowly transition to a typical cydippid larva, as if they were going back in time, was simply fascinating,” Soto-Angel said in a press release from the university.’
Curious as to how physical trauma would impact the species, the marine biologists Soto-Angel and Burkhardt surgically removed lobes grown in adulthood. ‘Of those 15 (which were still part of the 65 total jellies), six of them reverted their age all the way backwards in just 15 days, compared to the roughly six weeks it took seven of the 50 that didn’t undergo the lobectomy to do the same. Clearly, the worse things get for these sea creatures, the more likely they are to retreat back into their childhood.’
Maybe that’s why some memories seem to live on longer than others, an open channel to self-preservation and survivability. Consequence of being starved from some feeling and yearning for it. Or still caught in the endless waves of trauma. The worse things get, the more likely it is to retreat back into childhood. And maybe that’s why these memories seem to return, again and again, revealing a deeper meaning that requires time (and distance) to unravel. I was here before, I am here again, and I will return the same yet changed. I am no longer where I was but I will remain there (and here) until the end.
(iii) sound and whole, safe and unharmed
Here’s another Ramadan memory. This one is my favorite and makes an appearance close to the hours of Iftar and always on the first day. As I prepare to warm up my child’s dinner, my finger touches a bit of food and I remind myself not to lick it off. Trigger, bloom and I locate myself, nine years old, arranging a plate of sticky kueh. My maternal great-grandmother Nek Yang stands beside me pouring out a plastic bag full of gravy into a bowl and my mother is by the sink. Out of habit, I licked my finger. The two of them paused and turned and my Nek Yang asked “dah buka?”, if I had broken my fast. I look back at both of them, panic rising to my chest. They both broke out into laughter. “Takper, tak sengaja”, it’s ok it was not on purpose, Nek Yang had said with a little nudge. I laughed too, feeling relieved.
I held onto this memory dearly not because there isn’t much else to go by. Nek Yang and I were very close and there’s so many other moments I could have returned to. However there was this specific quality to the memory that made it so precious. My mother has always been stern when it comes to errors, unforgiving and cruel with her reactions. And I knew that my Nek Yang was equally stern with her or maybe even more than she was with me. However, in this rare instance, there was room for mischief and mistakes, as if they too were nine year olds, making silly errors only nine year olds could and we were all in on it. I could still feel our laughter, a spell only women across generations can make and I felt protected and comforted by it.
Sometimes my mother recounts the entire scene, and we share in the joy of it. I wonder whether it is precious to her for the same reasons. As I aged each year though, this memory have grown dim. Patchy details and not as vivid. I have to conjure up the memory (and the way it makes me feel) through the remembering, the retelling of it. I know for a fact the memory is dying and one day it may slip quietly from me and I would not even know it. I wonder if memories die when we don’t need them any longer.
And then there are those that I still yearn for. Like the way my parents tease each other and the way they laugh until they are in tears or that feeling of falling asleep while talking to my sister who was also falling asleep, or the warm breath of my nenek as she read prayers and blows air unto my forehead. The way my father teaches. I know I have lived through those moments but I can no longer recall them as memories. They exist simply as a list of things now. These memories are gone for good, no trigger to bloom, no going back in time, access denied.
Anyway Ramadan has always been the hardest time to come upon the memories of my family; lost or alive, recurring or random, vivid or foggy, bad or good, doesn’t really matter because the pain feels the same all over. Pair that up with a birthday too should have been some kind of depression cherry disaster. Yet somehow, finally after three four long decades, I have learnt to accompany the pain instead of shirking it away or repressing it somewhere deep inside myself.
The pain no longer frightens the shit out of me like it used to. I no longer question the hand that I’m dealt with. I have come to realised recently that I have enough memories to last me this long, this sweet thing of a life and they have brought me so much and brought me so far. Is this healing? Am I finally sound and whole, safe and unharmed? Maybe who knows. Who cares to know for sure because it still gonna feel hella good. The earliest seeds may have well been planted, but it sure as hell has been a long time coming and I fucking deserve to be here. <3
Thank you for reading through this messy thing my loves. I’m still in the midst of madness atm and appreciate all of you always. Till next time, hydrate, ressociate and stay in love.
Thank you for sharing 💞