Never, No More
Breaking news, people: On the 25th of June, I officially became the first person in the world to lick the Angkor Wat. Well, maybe not the first person to lick it (perhaps others before me have had the same strange urge) but definitely the first person to lick that particular pillar. I’ve got photographic proof, though I’m not sure anyone wants to see it. And for the faint hearted, don’t worry, M made me sanitise the spot with dettol before my tongue ventured within a germ’s leap of it.
So I’m finally back from roughly a month and a half of wandering around Asia, a boat on an anchor with the freedom to drift but a chain always tied to home. Seeing new places is great but living out of a suitcase not so.
There is a strange new-familiarity about returning. I walk the streets I always walk and drink in the sounds I have listened to since I was little but my hands and eyes feel clumsy and I’m still a little rusty at using a computer or sleeping alone in the dark. I’ve been through enough to know that not much will surprise me anymore. I’ve seen people eat cockroaches and drink wine laced with essence of gecko and pheasant. I’ve been crammed on an airless, oven-like minibus for six hours while half-naked drunk Britishers with nipple piercings shout over the rattle of the wheels. I’ve slept in the middle of a river, on a bed that smells like stale pee and I’ve sat on the edge of the River Kwai bridge watching the sun sink in the sky, feeling a rain-fresh breeze touch my skin.
Almost nothing will surprise me anymore. Almost.
One thing makes my stomach turn in puzzled wonder. Home no longer feels like home. My room is still my favourite place to be and Chip still curls up in his basket on the floor every night, jumping into my bed in the wee hours of the morning. My brothers are still chatty and comical and the kitchen door still creaks in measured evensong. And yet…
Perhaps it is the fact that we will be moving soon or that a milestone in my life, marked by school, has passed. But I find a wall slowly growing between myself and my parents. Like a falcon turning in its ever-widening gyre, our words choke and fumble at each other’s ears. There are things I want to tell them but that I know now I will never be able to say. Things that a child should be able to turn to a parent with; hopes and fears and quiet sorrows.
My mother, at least, makes an effort to understand and to support me in whatever I do. My relationship with my father, however – well, what is it with girls and their fathers anyway? We love and hate in the same breath, hate because they never understand or attempt to let go of their egos, love because we must and because we can’t help it. And slowly but surely, I’m beginning to believe that if my father knew who I really was, he wouldn’t like me as a person. Rather than accept me for who I am, he might choose to believe that he brought me up badly or I was led astray by wayward friends.
Our definitions and ideas of happiness have come to differ so much that I sometimes wonder if he is living vicariously through me, trying to find new life in my endeavours while happening to forget that it is really me I need to please now. I have spent so much of my life living in the shadow of other people’s decisions that I feel, perhaps selfishly, that my childhood passed by while I watched helplessly from the sidelines. The irony of feeling most comfortable with myself in places that are not my comfort zone doesn’t escape me and while I can’t go on travelling indefinitely, the pull to find a little place, all my own, where I can be myself grows inexorably stronger.
And this to me is strange, that once I lived in an ivory tower where I looked up to my father and truly wanted to be anything he wanted me to be while now, I want to be my own person but still beg his blessing. I am who I am now, and I can’t change that. What hurts most is that sometimes, on truly bad days, he makes me feel as if I should want to.
Coming home is meant to be a comforting experience, like sliding into water that is warm as a womb. But I cannot completely relax when disapproval and guilt hang like a mantle over us.
All I do is wonder why it is that being in your arms anchors me so completely where my own flesh and blood fail to make me feel complete.
So I’m finally back from roughly a month and a half of wandering around Asia, a boat on an anchor with the freedom to drift but a chain always tied to home. Seeing new places is great but living out of a suitcase not so.
There is a strange new-familiarity about returning. I walk the streets I always walk and drink in the sounds I have listened to since I was little but my hands and eyes feel clumsy and I’m still a little rusty at using a computer or sleeping alone in the dark. I’ve been through enough to know that not much will surprise me anymore. I’ve seen people eat cockroaches and drink wine laced with essence of gecko and pheasant. I’ve been crammed on an airless, oven-like minibus for six hours while half-naked drunk Britishers with nipple piercings shout over the rattle of the wheels. I’ve slept in the middle of a river, on a bed that smells like stale pee and I’ve sat on the edge of the River Kwai bridge watching the sun sink in the sky, feeling a rain-fresh breeze touch my skin.
Almost nothing will surprise me anymore. Almost.
One thing makes my stomach turn in puzzled wonder. Home no longer feels like home. My room is still my favourite place to be and Chip still curls up in his basket on the floor every night, jumping into my bed in the wee hours of the morning. My brothers are still chatty and comical and the kitchen door still creaks in measured evensong. And yet…
Perhaps it is the fact that we will be moving soon or that a milestone in my life, marked by school, has passed. But I find a wall slowly growing between myself and my parents. Like a falcon turning in its ever-widening gyre, our words choke and fumble at each other’s ears. There are things I want to tell them but that I know now I will never be able to say. Things that a child should be able to turn to a parent with; hopes and fears and quiet sorrows.
My mother, at least, makes an effort to understand and to support me in whatever I do. My relationship with my father, however – well, what is it with girls and their fathers anyway? We love and hate in the same breath, hate because they never understand or attempt to let go of their egos, love because we must and because we can’t help it. And slowly but surely, I’m beginning to believe that if my father knew who I really was, he wouldn’t like me as a person. Rather than accept me for who I am, he might choose to believe that he brought me up badly or I was led astray by wayward friends.
Our definitions and ideas of happiness have come to differ so much that I sometimes wonder if he is living vicariously through me, trying to find new life in my endeavours while happening to forget that it is really me I need to please now. I have spent so much of my life living in the shadow of other people’s decisions that I feel, perhaps selfishly, that my childhood passed by while I watched helplessly from the sidelines. The irony of feeling most comfortable with myself in places that are not my comfort zone doesn’t escape me and while I can’t go on travelling indefinitely, the pull to find a little place, all my own, where I can be myself grows inexorably stronger.
And this to me is strange, that once I lived in an ivory tower where I looked up to my father and truly wanted to be anything he wanted me to be while now, I want to be my own person but still beg his blessing. I am who I am now, and I can’t change that. What hurts most is that sometimes, on truly bad days, he makes me feel as if I should want to.
Coming home is meant to be a comforting experience, like sliding into water that is warm as a womb. But I cannot completely relax when disapproval and guilt hang like a mantle over us.
All I do is wonder why it is that being in your arms anchors me so completely where my own flesh and blood fail to make me feel complete.
She said, she said at 12:16 am
2 Comments:
I sorta know where you're coming from. From observing my older brother, I've come to the conclusion that a change in the balance of power is necessary for every child to become the adult. And it may be the simplest thing as asking your parent how THEY are BEFORE they ask you. Almost like counseling your parents as you would a younger friend. Small things that tweak your position from child/follower to adult/equal if not leader.
I may not be making sense but it seems to have worked with my parents...maybe it might with yours...
I do sorta see what you mean... it's like you have to become a person in your own right and cut the apron strings somehow... And I'll give anything a try right now! I'm just so desperate to come home one day and not have every little thing nit-picked at and judged... and not to feel so much guilt about it. Maybe one day I'll actually succeed!
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