Two years ago today, she would have found out by now about the news. her saturday morning would have gone from sunny to broken; where the liquid gold splashes of sunshine splattered across her bedroom floor would have gone from incredible to incongruous. the smiles of the morning would have gone jagged-edged.
broken mornings. shards.
i can actually still remember the rawness that shredded my voice when my parents found me screaming and shaking with sobs on the floor beside my sister's bed.
but yesterday had none of that.
yesterday, i took the bus alone to bright hill. that morning i had bought a single white rose-- a rose i had not planned to buy. i had thought of lilies, of carnations, even of a chrysanthemum as a sort of reminder of the joke he had played in sec 2. but the moment i walked up to the store, i saw this perfect rose-- perfectly in bloom.
One of my yearmates asked this question-- what good are funerals?
for delivering the rose you should have given way back when. for remembering his smile and the sparkle in his eyes. for saying goodbye. for saying sorry when it's far too late, when you should have been there for him when he needed it. for regret for having let the friendship fade.
the-- crematorium? -- was closed when i reached. i was perfectly fine walking up and around the temple, but when the two workers packing up said that everything was locked up and to come back tomorrow, and i smiled and said "no, it's okay, it's because today is his--" my smile just broke and suddenly there was this strange warmth flowing from my eyes that i could barely recognise. i hadn't thought there would be tears. the impossibility of tears.
i walked away. stood at a bannister for a while and whispered into the still, still air. he wasn't there, he really wasn't. i couldn't feel him anymore.
afterwards i walked out of the temple, rose in hand. i ducked into the field behind the bus-stop, tramped through ankle-and-sometimes-calf-deep grass/mud, and reached a bridge.
held the rose against the letter. it was almost as though there was another image silvered onto it, the white long-stemmed unbloomed rose that i had bought two years ago, held against the same whiteness of the envelope of the letter i had written then. the quiet cream of the petals whispering across the expanse of snow, with the black-lettered name that suddenly seemed so stark and yet so apt.
i breathed, and threw letter and flower out onto the river.
ru guo nan guo, qing ni wang le wo