Beauty & Bedlam

“I want to be different.”

That was her matter-of-fact statement as she rescued a wayward drop of strawberry ice-cream with her tongue, her feet tucked under her knees on the sunlit patch of grass.

“Not just different different, but different,” her inflection and tone making all the difference in the seemingly nonsensical sentence. 

He gazed at her, nodding, not really understanding, but accepting. She is so beautiful to him, her shock of tousled red hair with multi-colored streaks; all added at different moments of her life. It started out with a single purple streak, then green, black, blonde, pink, and another green. She doesn’t remove any of the previous colors, but simply adds on, and on. One after another. “It lets me remember things, if I remove them, I won’t be able to remember,” was her cheerful yet dismissive explanation. 

“I don’t want to live like, like this. I want to amazing, I want to be everything and yet I want a life that nobody can call anyone’s else. I want to encompass.” Her arms flung out wide for emphasis, the tattoo running along her wrist a stark contrast against her pale skin.

She has tattoos, several of them, on different spots of her body. The one on her wrist reads a line of a famous Spanish song, she has an Arabic quote on her nape, a Chinese poem scripted along the curve of her hip, an African tribal chant immortalized just underneath her left breast and even a Tamil one, on her right ankle. They are always words of different languages, never pictures. ”Pictures are so…universal,” she once said scornfully. “And besides, if I can never be the many different people from all around the world in this life, I’m gonna at least fucking try to embed some of them on me.”

She has lapsed into a momentarily silence, seemingly absorbing the weight of her previous statement. He couldn’t tear his eyes off her, it was like a mesmerization of magnetic proportions. She absently licks her fast melting cone. “Strawberry,” he thought amusedly in his enraptured daze, “Strawberry, her favorite flavor. Such an ordinary and plain flavor for such a magnificently colorful girl.” But somehow, with her, even strawberry has a certain exciting allure, such is the vibrancy of her entire being.

And yet she wants to be so much more. She told him before, many times, in snatches and broken pieces of many different conversations they shared atop this grassy patch they call their own.

She wants to be a pilot, and she wants to crash and survive on a deserted island so she can try out smoke signals and SOS signs, hunt for her own rabbit and build her own fire. She wants to be rescued though, she informed him, so she could open a bakery selling the craziest muffins ever. How does ginger and peanut butter muffin sound? Delicious, he lied. She wants to be insanely rich for one month and lose it all the next. She wants to try living on the streets and stealing apples off carts, and she wants to tear through Neiman Marcus the next. She wants to have hair to her ass and shave it all off.  She had already taken up and mastered the waltz, reggae and belly-dancing. She wants to be on television, try out being famous and then changing her name and running off to Asia the very next week. She wants everything this world could possibly offer, to traverse the entire spectrum of everything and anything, and judging from how well he knew her, she is going to try her damndest to do it too. 

A single drop of strawberry ice-cream escaped her notice and stained a pink spot on her long white skirt. She looks down at it and looks up again, bestowing upon him a dazzling smile.

“Well, all the better anyway. The pink spot makes this skirt different from the rest now.”

Never an Eve but instead, the Pandora of today’s world, the Aphrodite of his dreams and an errant piece of cookie dough that had escaped the cookie cutter of society.

Dear Mama,

So it was Mothers’ Day yesterday. There were a lot of wishes going around, I know. I wished you too, but it was weird. You know, and I know, that our family are not really into these kinda things. Moreover, I’m just an awkward person like that. How many times have I actually said the words ‘I love you’ aloud? Not many, I think. It was only in Jogja that I remember saying it to you more often, simply because we’re communicating through the telephone. Sorry Mama, this daughter of yours doesn’t deal well with eye contact. And emotional words. Well, feelings and socializing in general.

But anw, I guess I just want to say that I love you. Well, not say, but write it down. For indeed, that is the power of the pen (keyboard), that things written last longer than things said. Written sources are more durable, and indeed, more reliable, than oral sources. And again, I digress.

So. I know, there are times when I made you question your mothering skills. Oh those times when I was such a rebel (you have to admit, I have mellowed down a lot), when I caused you to be called down to school countless times. You must also often wonder, what kind of daughter you have, one who is in university, truly enjoys learning, but her greatest ambition is to live in a village and be a teacher-cum-shepherd. Oh, and to change the world, of course.

But fret not, I promise that I will make you proud. All those people who have been telling you that you’re too liberal with me, simply because you allow me to travel, simply because I have no curfew, in a few years time, you can tell them to screw themselves. All those people who have been telling you that you need to be firmer with me, who have been telling you to advise me to be less restless and live life as society wants me to, who have been telling me to be more realistic and pragmatic, soon you can tell them to mind their own business. Because, Mama, I will prove to them that you’ve not gone wrong in mothering, that you have a daughter who will do good in this world, who dreams big but does not simply stop at dreaming. A daughter who will make you, our family, and society proud, insyaAllah.

Till then, I guess you’ll just have to bear with my quirks and fancies. I promise to make it more bearable fro you, though (:

To Mama, I love you not because you’ve taken care of me the past 23 years, not because you’ve been patient and lenient with me and my quirks, not because you’re kinda liberal and trust me a lot, not because you’ve been supporting all my decisions. I love you simply because, you are my mother. I do not need a bigger reason than that, really. Thank you, for being my mother.

Dear Diary. Indeed, that is a phrase I have not used since, oh, 7 years ago or so. I really did use to keep a proper physical diary, not simply one on the www. Then, I grew up and grew lazy.

But anyhoos, I’ve decided tt perhaps, its time I start penning down my thoughts again. Not literally penning it down, though, am still too lazy for tt. But really, we all need an outlet for our thoughts. Especially when you have so many of them. Thoughts, I mean. Its not healthy to have too many thoughts in your head, but then, tts the nature of humans isn’t it. To keep thinking and thinking, about everything. To have opinions on everything. Not tt these opinions really matter, actually, but tts another topic altogether.

AND SO. I digressed. So much that I cannot, for the life of me, remember what I set out to write. Oh wells.