day 309

My grandmother visited us the night before. The same green butterfly (I always associate a green butterfly with my grandmother, for there was one that landed on top of her coffin) flew past me earlier in the day towards my room. I figured that she decided to tell my love what a little boy I was to her and what a little boy I will continue to be. Apparently, I have a boy with her, who we left behind back home. I imagined myself to be lying next to my ah Ma, as I used to while she smoked, and my love would be listening, with blurry pupils, the tips from our older generations. (After all, she wouldn't get to see my future wife.)

In between the dead, who have passed, and the to-be-borne, who is to come, we are the ones still together. Perhaps, it is a little vision that came about by virtue of our togetherness. A shared and charged moment in time when my unforgettable image of a green butterfly met the unforgettable image of the future. Perhaps, to her, it's just a dream. But to me, it meant that ah Ma is always with me. Perhaps, not in the way that they like to say, as a spirit, but as a future memory, a relentless charge towards the familiar unknown.

To meet her again, or rather, as the absent party in a dream, and in a foreign land, was an extremely heart-warming experience. It is an approval - to what I cannot be certain. But as my love lamented the fact that it was all too haunting but sweet, bittersweet, the real lament is that I cannot say hi myself. The tears probably dried up long ago. But if there is a reason why and how I come to become who I am, and will be, it was because she filled up a large part of me when I was. And now, and of course, surely she was curious to see the person who will now be the one to fill up another large part of me. It's not rivalry. I hope. Instead, I hope they had a good talk - ah Ma to her little girl. The same kind of conversation I had when she sat at the edge of her queen size bed, and I, behind her, lying, or sometimes massaging her, and telling her repeatedly, how she should stop smoking. She never did. But it's ok. We all never stop being stupid, drugging ourselves, being ourselves. I'm glad she came to see her and not me. For I know, I would have certainly cried.