An Apology:
May 19, 2009
In my younger years, I wrote poems about the boy I loved, and named him ‘Parasite’.
Of course, we must take into consideration that in my younger years,
I wore shuffle socks and
followed soap operas and
learnt dance routines to Canadian pop songs.
I’m muddling time now, memory betraying me so that everything up until this point is a custard of Sunday afternoons , my father’s hands, getting a rabbit for my 9th birthday, and my first period.
As a child,
I believed my sister’s word gospel and hid behind my brother’s door while he rehearsed flirtations with girls from the neighbouring school, and learnt to sing his favourite tracks off our collectively-owned copy of Pop Shop 36.
I thought my grandfather untouchable,
Before I noticed his bigotry and I battled with the truth of the man versus the obligation to only speak of the dead in golden terms.
I expected to live with my parents forever,
took glee in spitting on mosquito bites,
obeyed commands from my older-wiser-impressive friend to practice French-kissing on my pillow.
In my younger years,
I punished you for every moment received and unreturned.
I really did believe I loved you – it felt similar to descriptions in Sweet Valley High novels, snuck in shadow on late afternoons in the school library.
Presumed
Imposed
Coerced
you,
poor little thing, who wanted nothing more than to
laugh and
learn to jive-dance and
achieve a position on the cricket team.
I believed my dead grandmother a ghost, dead pets ghosts, Std 3 teacher…
Now you are ghostly.
And I’m older now,
with more room in me for ghosts.
And I’m learning that a child raised on indulgence, dangerously called ‘romance’ in music, poems, adolescent pulp fiction
sullies
sulks
debases
her own chances at the entire affair from the start.
And I see that I was a bully.
That it was me doing the damn parasiting,
So that I was as impressed by my proclamations of love as I was by my new LP.
And all you wanted was to be a boy
who played with beetles,
and won at marbles, sometimes.
