FROM THOSE WHO LOVED YOU BEFORE I COULD

my first tiny bonus post! short story i wrote months ago, an addendum to the previous post

Hi everyone.

I’d love to sit here and type to you all day, but I have an exam tomorrow that I ought to be prepping for. A few readers wanted to see more of the short story beyond the small snippet I posted in the last post, so I figured I’d share it all with you here. For context, I wrote this for a creative writing practice course I took last Winter semester. Consider this a tiny little bonus post until my next ‘proper’ post, which will probably be on my birthday. Probably. If you’ve ever been wondering what I’ve been up to for the past year, stay tuned for that. Even if you are a good friend of mine, there are probably aspects of my life you don’t see. I’m a man of the town, you know? Here today, gone tomorrow. I’ll worry about that once I’m done with this semester.

One more quick thing - thank you everybody who ever comments/texts me/e-mails in response to these hitting your inbox/notifications/snail mailbox. A good man texted me a few hours after my last post, saying I do a great job of sharing enough without oversharing. It’s always a fine line between being vulnerable, and dumping the entire kitchen sink. I think, though, that the only people who read these posts are the people who know me (my friends <3) and the people who google my name on a whim. I’m cool with the former, and the latter cares enough to know about me, to the point where they’ll read these. In these instances, the balancing act isn’t much of an effort at all. Anyone who takes the time to read what I take the time to write intrinsically knows what they’re getting into already, I think. That’s all to say: thanks for reading and writing to me. You take care now, okay? I’ll write to you soon enough.

Yours,
Remiel

When I was smaller than you are now, your Grandmother would keep track of time in terms of your Lolo. Last night was never last night; it would be when Lolo had left for work. Two days from now would never be a Monday, but instead it would be when she gets to see Lolo next. In our household, there were no clocks I could understand.

Before we made the move to the big city, your grandparents and I lived out West, in a shoddy wooden shack just a well-tread dirt trail away from the station. My world ended at the train tracks; beyond them, a world that Lolo would disappear to for weeks at a time, a place I could only mark by the rumble of trains, the quieting of whistles, and the silence that follows. The trail to the station would end up etched into the Earth itself, a carved-out groove stamped out by boots bigger than mine. As the groove became more defined, so too did the gnarls and calluses in Grandmother’s hands. When she wasn’t sleeping or checking the mailbox, Grandmother would root herself in the kitchen. The tired planks on the floor were marked by the worn-out slippers that Grandmother wore, the same ones her Grandmother used to wear. From my view from below the counter, I could barely discern the colours and smells of her work, of the dishes with names my tongue stumbled across. Cooking was Grandmother’s pride and joy, the only part of her life she enjoyed showing off. It was a tradition, she’d say, that existed long before I did.

While Grandmother marked time by Lolo’s comings and goings, I would learn to measure it through her daily ritual. Before the sun came up, she would throw on a massive, quilted apron over her small frame. The fabric was stained with colours, faded and new, of prior cooking sessions. Each time, I worried that she would end up being swallowed by the apron; Grandmother refused to get one that would fit her proper, for history, she would say, could never be bought. By sunrise, the house was filled with the same familiar smell of dishes I could never pronounce, and like clockwork, Grandmother would call for me to sit at the dinner table. “Eat, before it gets cold,” she would recite. It was in the moments I tree branched into the chair, the moments where my chin would awkwardly sit just above the edge of the table, where I would get close enough to the meals your Grandmother would make. It was always some sort of stew, piled clumsily on a bed of white rice, the warmth of her hands radiating off it. If I looked closely enough, I could tell that she would be able to sandwich in an ‘I love you’ between the two.

I could tell what time of the year it was based on when the vegetables in the stew switched. I remember most, the Ancho chilies she would drop in during the summer months, for these were the only times my mouth failed to form words. Grandmother would never sit with me to eat. She would plant herself, in the creases of the kitchen floorboards, listening, carefully, for the sound of train cars, or engines, some sign, any, that she could eat, all the while glancing at me, making sure I left my plate empty. In the interim between when the food got cold, and when she would sleep for the night, she would see me off to bed, walk back to the kitchen and, after waiting a few more moments, finish off her day’s labour.

It was on the nights when the silence was filled, and when the train tracks grew raucous, that I would witness your Grandmother eat. Rarely did Lolo come back, and when he did, he would enter as quiet as the space he left in our home. I would look away one moment, and the next, he would appear to us, sitting in the chair that fit him much better than it did me. And your Grandmother - oh, I could not see much on nights like this, you should know, but it was like she had never seen a day of labour before that night. Gone were the apron, the slippers, the dirtying of hands - in their place, two full dishes, piled high atop china I had never seen prior, being picked at quietly. They would sit with one another in silence, mouths closed, and yet, through some means, they would be pouring themselves into one another all the same. Entire conversations, held taut in the now closed distance between them, were being translated into forks, clanking onto porcelain. On nights like this, I could see on her face a smile, filled with food she had yet to cook for us.

Whenever your Grandmother noticed me peering at them, she would pick me up by the waist, place me in your Lolo’s lap, and gaze at me. She stared as if to study me, as if to keep us stuck in time. She knew that the train would eventually come again, and with it, another stain on her apron - but none of that would matter. For Lolo had come home that day, and there was not a clock in sight. Tomorrow would never have to come, for Lolo was here now; time, then, did not have to mean anything to us, at least until the next time Lolo had to leave for work.