Unexpressed

Amma,

I hate housework.

I hated it since that day you spent so long making beautiful flower arrangements trimmed with the scraps of lace and ribbon you had saved. I remember you prepared one of your delicious meals and set the table out so carefully with the best flower arrangement as a center piece. I still remember your calloused hands smoothing out the table cloth. But you couldn’t smooth out the bigger, more glaring wrinkles, no matter how hard you tried.

And you tried so hard.

I remember how you waited… I started out on your lap, on the floor, I moved further away as the hollow minutes ticked and finally ended up on the staircase peeking out warily between the banisters like a scared, caged animal. I can still hear the silence that walked in when he finally came home. Then the screams began. The shattering of a vase, the smashed flowers, the drip of curry hurled at the wall. Choked sobs, unbearably painful, each heave of your chest weighed with years and years of suffocating frustration, became slower… and softer…

Hearing the silence of smothered screams I peeked through the banisters again. You had picked up the crushed flowers, the dirty ribbon and the sharp bloodstained shards of ceramic. You were wiping the walls. My 8 year old brain tried and failed to find a word, an expression, an analogy for what it understood. 20 year old me is filling in the blanks now.

Futile.

Vicious cycle.

Like quicksand, the more you struggle to get out of it the more you are entrenched in it.

I’m sorry amma, for all the times it seemed like I didn’t care because I didn’t pick up a broom, didn’t touch a duster or a mop.

I love you more than you will ever know.

I still don’t have the words to express that feeling.

Duwa 

Christina De Silva
13. 03. 2011