English Creative Writing

memorising.

paragraph 1

I remember when I was told about your existence for the first time.

paragraph 2

Your story began as not yours, but my mother’s, of a distant stranger as I had no idea what you looked like, sounded like or who you actually were. Though, I knew about the coldly shut door, my mother pleading with tears in her eyes, and you: the son who refused to respond,

paragraph 3

And so that was you. Defined by absence instead of prescence. You lived purely as a narrative and the most uncomfortable footnote in the story, as no family was said to be complete without their son. In the movie directed by mind, your role was to simply play a minor antagonist.

paragraph 4

Told so little, I filled in the gaps, even without my eomma’s tellings, I invented a version of you to provide myself with explantation. To give myself a reason to why you were gone, not just from her life but also mine.

paragraph 5

I don’t know when I began to flesh out the nuances of your character; perhaps I grew tired of the cartoon villain I had constructed. Maybe it was moments like slowly discovering fragmented pieces of your life, when my eomma would slowly replace little pieces of my movie.

paragraph 6

I got to know that you were awfully distant from your appa (father), and the fact that you had lived most of your life without an eomma. My sisters grew fond of you and even felt pity for you, yet even with knowing more, I didn’t want to understand as my perspective of you remained in the back of my mind, which was nothing more or less than a bad person

paragraph 7

Fast forward, as I grew older, I started imagining the world as the way you may have viewed it. As we age, I guess we see our parents’ shortcomings, and so you slowly became the brother who had discovered the flaws before me. I began to understand that this world has treated you with less care, compared to what I have experienced. I never knew the meaning of separation, as I was merely a mirror of a daughter of a perfect family, living a life full of the warmth of family. Perhaps you were told to mature too quickly, that you haven’t actually been able to do so.

paragraph 8

Here is the alternative ending my mind eventually consdiered: the version of you who had faint memories of our eomma, with an extended period of estrangement, of almost more years that how long I have lived.

paragraph 9

The majority of your childhood was spent like this, haunted and defined by the absence of your parents, where your appa solely focused on his current family, and your eomma left you behind with broken promises.

paragraph 10

You waited for her, miserably clinging onto the string of hope that she will return to you. You were confident you would not let go of it, yet you couldn’t help the admiration turning into resentment as the isolation only intensified.

paragraph 11

It never occurred to me that whilst I defined you by absence, you did the same to our eomma. You hadn’t seen the other scenes play out; eomma begging your father to let her see you and the harsh rejections she underwent. There was no way you could have known about her waiting, her tenaciously trying to find a way for a reunion with you, or her guilt of leaving you behind countries away, eating her alive every night.

paragraph 12

Your version that I never wanted to hear until now, having exhausted all the imaginative possibilities and in time to make a new one. Your defensive instinct to refuse, played out with catastrophic soundtracks in my mind, though for you, it was a shielf, to protect yourself from a constant cycle of hope and disappointment.

paragraph 13

Was it the childish desire of mine to determine the heroes and villains? Maybe it was to protect my eomma from becoming the bad. In the end, maybe you were doing the same, whose only fault is being born by a different father and living half a world away.

paragraph 14

I now saw that I was the problem; I kept treating you like a character I had to rewrite, instead of a person I never truly got to know. So, the most important scenes I had ruthlessly ignored in the cinema of my mind was what really revealed you as a person.

paragraph 15

You were not the son who had shut the door, but a boy who was left behind one, and had spent his life waiting for it to be opened.