Collide✔️

e i g h t e e n

I've always thought that the best way to distract the mind from one thing is to focus your undivided attention of another. I did just that with this whole impending marriage disaster. So overwhelmed with it that I focused my attention on escaping it. And with Kian – desperately infatuated so instead, I read page after page of literature, even welcoming the rather intimate paragraphs.

Perhaps it's not exactly the healthiest of coping mechanisms, nor the most successful – most times I find my thoughts returning to the nagging matter at hand, like engagement or newfound attraction – but it's all I have. Except, for days since the occurrence with my mother, I have not been able to distract myself. Not even in the slightest.

Nothing else possesses my thoughts, not Eason or Kian or the girls that float in and out of my bedroom. No, I'm completely stuck on one single, prominent thought. Why can't my mother remember?

Call it curiosity, or maybe even concern, but for the past three days, I've been hunched over Hegemony issued books from our library, ranging from neurological science, supplementation, right up to menopause and the female anatomy, all in search for answers to this unbudging question. I don't care much for my parents, especially not since this whole ordeal with them controlling every aspect of my life and whatnot, but still, I have this irrefutable desire to figure this out. Maybe it's because the more I think about it, my mother wasn't always like this.

It's quite possible that I've just been burying these memories, making space for newer ones, but now, they're all flooding back. The times when my mother and I would dance around to the jazz music she played. Or when she would dress me in her evening gowns and let me run around the garden pretending I was a highness. Then the times she would lay me to bed, planting kisses across my face as she told of how much she loved me. How no love could be parallel to that which she felt for me, as my mother.

At the recall, my eyes sting. I can't even put a date to the last time my mother told me she loved me. Certainly not anytime of recent, quite possibly even years ago. So perhaps this is for me; closure, found in the reason behind why I lost the mother I knew.

I don't even lift my head when I note the drapes off to the left of me catch the wind when the balcony doors open. For the past week now, I have had only Kian visit me from my balcony and so, I expect the very same this evening. He never stays for long, a few hours at most. I'd like to think it's because we're being far more cautious since we were almost discovered, but I think it's more down to my being preoccupied.

He closes the door and makes his way over to my bed, moving aside the stack of books I have already read and sitting himself in front of me. "Princess?"

"Hm?" I mumble, dampening the tip of my middle finger on my tongue before flicking the page.

"Don't you think this is just getting a little bit out of hand?" I lift my head and offer him a deadpan expression. He tilts his head and smiles at me, allowing the cocooned butterflies in my stomach to erupt.