My favourite topic to talk about is me. How I understood comfort, felt anger, fell in love, got my heart broken and was proud of myself. It’s all about I, it’s all about me, it’s all about myself.
“Your head is full of snakes, you’re Medusa!”
The chuckles seemed to run across the room punctuated by the chant, “Medusa! Medusa! Medusa!”
I whipped my head around, and it felt like those snakes were rearing their ugly heads and hissing. The minutes passed, and they didn’t stop laughing. I heard “Medusa, Medusa” for the rest of the day after that every time I crossed a corner. I was more enraged than upset by the whole ordeal. A bad joke tends to stick like pesky blue tack that won’t come off your wall without stripping away the paint because they’re sticking together so firmly. I wouldn’t have minded if he had whispered it in my ear but when he said it in front of the whole class. I imagined turning him to stone with a glance, but no matter how much I glared at him he didn’t drop dead. That was the first time I felt anger.
***
I was five when my heart was first broken.
I looked at her, and then I looked at the seat next to her and it hurt. I tried not to make it evident. I sort of brushed past them but I had given myself away. My face had slipped for just a second – my pupils widened while my lips twisted sideways. Humph. She had seen. When I sat in the back, I watched their lips moving slowly, and the shape of their mouths making the words. Why would she go back on her word? One second we were making the promise, curling our pinky fingers in a promise forever, and the next I was cast aside like I didn’t mean anything to her. It was like my heart was just this crumpled up piece of paper which had so many creases in it that no matter how many times I tried to smooth it out it made no difference. The wrinkles remained. Etched in my memory. I never made those stupid pinky promises again.
Whoever thought of the idea in the first place didn’t know what they were about anyways.
***
The first time I
Learnt how to tie my ghungroos on my
own, I felt triumphant.
The string which I
Carefully wound across my ankles tightly and securely
In a perfect bow.
This time around I
Didn’t have to wait around for anyone else
To help me tie them.
The sound that I
Made reverberated so much better throughout the room
A final rhythm accomplished.
4, 8, 4 I
banged my feet like the number of words
in each poetic line.
At the end I
Noticed that they didn’t slide off like normal
But stayed in place.
Now, standing up I
Felt seasoned, as if I had learnt something
No one could teach.
4, 8, 4 I
Realised that the even spaced beat was so
Perfect in its design.
***
The first time I ate an ice cream, it was a softie in a crunchy waffle cone. When they pressed the waffle paper thin in their flattening machine, it made a crunchy hissing sound as it sizzled. It smelled divine, like the chocolate that my mother kept at the top of the fridge and it had the same scent as her perfume, like vanilla and cinnamon mixed into one delicious slice of heaven. The thick white cream was curled into the deftly crafted cone, and was placed in my hand all in one go. I remember staring at it in wonderment, and then licking it, with just the tip of my tongue tentatively. Testing the waters. It was then that the tastes imploded. Hints of softness cloyed at my taste buds and the crumbly texture of the cone contrasted the thick luxuriousness of the ice cream. Like two pieces of a puzzle which fit together just right. I became bolder, I took larger licks, like a dog licking a bone. The flavours and textures travelled down my throat deftly, as a fast flowing river travelled down a mountain and pooled in a glacier of comfort right at the pit of my stomach. I made quick work of it then, until sticky smears of leftover ice cream coated the sides of my mouth and lips. I smiled the whole time because ice cream tasted like my favourite thing in the whole world. It tasted like coming home.
***
The first time I opened a book to actually read it, I read it out loud because I didn’t know it was possible to read it silently in my brain.
The first time I read a book, I stopped for 2 seconds at all the full stops, and 1 second at all the commas because my school librarian made me promise to do so.
The first time I read a book, I only actually read it because we had to for a 2nd grade school project, so I marked out all my favourite parts in brightly coloured post-its which made it look like a colourful garden from the outside.
The first time I read a book, the distinctive smell that I now associate with books was something I didn’t recognise and now I wonder if someone can bottle up that scent so I can keep it with me forever.
The first time I read a book, I loved it so much that I never stopped reading again.