Dear Alice

dear alice,

is it odd that i frequently obsess over my childhood, and wish that i too, once fell from a tree and broke my arm?

as the years progress and my hair grows longer, the burden of maturity weighs heavier on my shoulders. they say the organization of a child’s brain is affected by early experiences. have i told you before about my very peculiar brain?

occasionally i think very hard and a particular memory of me as a newborn being pushed back to the ward by my uncle surfaces. in this flashback i am swaddled in white cloth and in a tank-like incubator. along the way there is a groove on the floor and i experience a bump as we go over it.

in another recollection, i am playing tag with a friend in the carpark behind school. i trip and scrape my knees, but she merely throws her head back and laughs, running further away from me.

during the following game of hide & seek, i hide behind a wall and stare into the kidney dialysis centre, making eye contact with someone who had tubes connected to them. i recall watching the liquid trickle through the rubber, unsure if it was entering or exiting the person. funny how now i understand why they were reclined in those chairs, and i wonder if they felt better after each session, as if the cleansing of the toxins included those in their minds.

alice, is this abnormal?

i am plagued by the fact that i will never be able to fit all the memories in my head and one day i will have blurry visions of past glories, unsure of which are true and which are not. i want to remember the taste of the ice popsicles we laid on our tongues after class and i want to remember the texture of the peeling walls from my grandmother’s home.

alas, my brain betrays me, for all that stains my mind is the smell of the funeral parlour and the embalming fluids. it scares me that one day i will try to return to my memory storage and find out that someone has locked all the drawers and set them on fire.

what frightens me the most is that the person who destroys everything is me.

___

Jamie is an 18 year old based in Singapore. She takes pictures and writes. In her free time she eats her weight in sweet corn.