midnight rain | ₐ bₒₒₖ ₒf ₚₒₑₘₛ

7. (prose)

Pink Paper

As a child, I used to look at my family and think we were like a piece of pretty pink paper, which was my favourite colour at the time. Growing up, I would look at the paper and think of all the wonderful things I could fold it into– maybe an origami rabbit? Or a flower? Or even just an envelope! Then I grew up a little and became preoccupied with things like BFFs and smiggle pencil cases and an endless appetite for books, and the pink paper got pushed to the back of my shelves to make space for the newer, shinier things. Every once in a while, I’d grow up just a bit more and come to check on my pink paper. Yup, still intact! Sure, there were a few stains here and there and the pink had gotten a bit faded over time, but I just shrugged it off because that’s what happens to things when you don’t watch them too closely.

But somewhere along the way, I blinked and then found myself standing here, fully grown (but not quite), all alone (but not quite), and feeling a bit lost and in want of an origami rabbit or flower or a letter that would tell you what to do. So I dug in my cluttered closet for weeks and weeks and finally found the pretty shiny pink paper– only it wasn’t pretty, nor shiny, nor pink, nor indeed a piece of paper at all but, in fact, a cube. In confusion and denial, I realised that I had been holding a pitch-black cube, dull and tremendously heavy between my hands, with one of its sides sloppily painted with pink, almost all of which had been scratched off by now.  I realised, that in all of my trusting childishness and unconditional love and perpetual hoping, hoping, hoping, I had been looking only upon the taunting pink side all my life, the black mass concealed behind. I had not dared to look. I had not wanted to look. So I simply gazed upon the heavy velvet curtain resting on a quiet, polished stage, refusing to believe that anything lay beyond, willing them stay shut so I may hide from the bad and the ugly. Am I a coward, I ask.

No, I say, I was just a child.

Am.

Suddenly, there were tears in my eyes– the wetness of guilt and admission, and the snaking grips of lies I believed for so long that they had become truths (but not quite) slithered down my cheeks like midnight rain on my old window panes. I had tied a rose-coloured cloth tightly around my too-trusting, too-curious, too-clever truth seeking eyes– I had taken a knife and blinded myself, both eyes, to distract myself from the pain of a thousand arrows shot through my still breathing lungs, every single breath like The Little Mermaid walking on land– was it worth it? If I can't see, then perhaps it doesn't even exist. The lies we tell ourselves, the pink paper that was stained with tears. Years came, went, growing up means loss– it came banging on my door in the middle of the night, bang, bang, BANG! Stormed in, grabbed me by the neck, ripped off the blindfold and made me look.

When I'm gone, please sit by the ocean, the Sea Foam slips through your fingers, drifts away. Gone.

Think of me, will you?

All too soon I find my arms aching and sore from the dead weight of the cube, I set it down and regarded it slowly. Where was my pastel pink, flowery, light-as-air paper? Where had it gone when I had looked away for just a second? And the question I had been too afraid to ask but echoed back at me eerily and hauntingly from the dark shadowy depths of my closet of my closet– 

Will I ever be able to get it back?

I don’t know.

Now the unassuming, mundane and pitiful pieces of the cube– from when it finally cracked from the pressure of its own weight, years ago— sits solemnly and quietly on the edge of my desk in a photo frame bordered with hand-picked seashells. I keep it on my desk all the time, so I can watch it closely and intently every day, just with a tiny bit of hope that in case it ever decides to fold and tape itself back into my pretty, shiny pink paper, I won’t be looking anywhere else.

Not that I’ve dared to blink again, because I haven’t. Not since I’d reckoned I’d grown up enough and put on my big-girl-glasses and saw my paper for what it was.

- girl and her pencil