WHY NOT!!

So the last few days Ive been pretty sad, I knock around back and forth between the computer and the comfort of my bed.

Why? Im trying to conjour up memories. I miss my nan immensely, and anything I try to do to recall a fond memory of her isn’t working.

Of course I am getting memories, but they are never the memories I want, they are always bad, or in some way attached to a bad memory.

For example, at night when I actually do sleep, I dream a lot of the old house in Tikipunga. The interior, the exterior, and all the memories it embodies. Okay, so I lived there for 2 years, good, I should have some good memories of my Nan and I there right?

The only ones I can think of are these:

We had just eaten dinner, it was the 16^th of January, to take a walk on the wild side my Nan suggests that we go shopping in lieu of doing the dishes. So we don’t even bother to stack the dishes, we leave them on the table, dirty fry pans still in the kitchen, jump in the car and head to the warehouse. We get home to find my Aunty Mata and Neville at our house.

That was the night my aunty had her car accident which left her to this day in a wheelchair.

My other thoughts of the old house are going up there on the weekend to “house sit”. I had moved home to my parents house again, I was 13, were it my choice I would have lived on my own, as a “Family Lifestyle” was so far beyond my normal life I had no idea how to fit in. For as long as I could remember it was ‘Me and Nan’ and ‘Them’. This had seriously thrown a wrench in the works.

I guess the time up at “home” was a place for me to decompress. I could spend the weekend on my own. In my home. And even though my Nan was in Auckland with my aunty who needed her, I could still lay on her bed and smell her. Feel her prescience.

Even though that memory has no physical presence of my Nan, Its still a memory OF my Nan, and the many times when I was dropped off I felt like no one understood me. That I was being sent there as punishment. That no one wanted me. That I was banished to be here on my weekends alone, when I missed my Nan so much, that all I had left of her was the shell of her being, her clothes in the wardrobe, her shoes by the door, and her scent in her blankets. I spent many hours silently crying in her bed, and for some reason it made me feel closer to her.

In hindsight, I should have just said I didn’t want to be up there by myself. I didn’t want to be by myself at all. I didn’t want to face being there on my own, and I wanted to feel included but don’t know how you (my family) will accept me. I should have, but I lacked the skills I needed to communicate this to people who were flesh of my flesh, and blood of my blood. I was an apple that had fallen from their tree, but I felt like I came from the grapevine instead.

Being a teenager was a weird time for me. When I turned 14, my Nan was still down at the Spinal Unit. My mum was going down every weekend to Auckland, and for a fear of going down there and then having to say goodbye to my Nan at the end of our visit, I stayed home on the weekends. My birthday approached during the week after my mum came home.

I lay on the bottom bunk in the back bedroom. I heard her come home. I lay silently as she entered the room I shared with my brother. She bent down and handed me a watch, and a note from my Nan. I don’t remember the exact words of the letter, but as I read it I remember my cheeks starting to feel a burning wet sensation, and as I touched my face I felt the tears. With all that was going on in her life, she had managed to find the time to jot a few lines down for me, to tell me how much she loved me and was proud of me. I felt so honored. But in the next sentence, I felt so cheated.

Of course when your that age everything in the universe is centered around you. You are the sun and everyone else is your solar system. Who told one of my planets they could go to a different universe, and take away all the things that I was accustomed to?

I thought life was unfair then…. And the funny thing is at the moment, I still feel cheated.