Once upon a time, there was a little girl who lived in a big, beautiful mansion. She had fat, rosy cheeks, sleek black hair falling to her waist and chubby little hands and legs. Well-beloved by all who knew her, she had a young loving mother and the most wonderful doting father. She had 3...
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I took a quiet moment tonight in my mum’s prayer room- away from the hustle of cars on the main road in front of my house. Away from my sleeping daughter who slumbered in the room next door. Away from my husband who was out celebrating a friend’s birthday.
I lit candles and the room filled...
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I’ve been in the hospital with my daughter for the last 2 days. A little surgery. Poor girl.
She came out of the operating theatre yesterday evening, placed in the recovery room, her small little body wrapped in some kind of foil-like thing, which I later found out was some kind of hyperthermia blanket system that...
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You got any hair gel I can borrow? he asks me.
Wtf? I don’t use hair gel, I retort. You know that.
My hair looks like shit, he says.
OK fine, I’ll see what I can do.
I shuffle to my Dad’s bathroom and find a still-full tub of Brylcreem hair gel, dandruff control. I stand there for a...
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Two days ago, I went to my favourite blue-and-yellow Swedish furniture giant store, Ikea. With my time at the firm coming to an end, I had some serious packing and clearing up to do. I wanted to buy some nice patterned boxes that I could re-use, and some scented candles. So I parked my car,...
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It has been 41 days now. How time passes by, in the twinkling of a star.
People see me today, full of compassion and concern. They ask me, are you ok? And they look at me with their sad puppy-dog eyes, rubbing my arm. And what am I to say? I should tell them the truth....
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Dear Roxy,
Does the pain ever go away? I think it never does. The pain remains as a constant niggling sensation, eating away at you every single day, until one day, it ceases to be a primary feeling, and diminishes into something less intense. But it still remains nevertheless. A sudden smell, thought, sound, a distant...
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He knew everything there was to know about the world. He was so knowledgeable, it astounded me. I truly believe until today, that he knew all the answers to every question I had. He was widely-read, wise, terribly smart. He possessed all this intelligence and knowledge without a shred of pride, with the longing to...
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My brother and I had been arguing about some remarkably silly trivial thing. Toys, or something. Growing up, with only a 2 year gap in our age differences, we loved each other with a ferocity only siblings know- but we also fought intensely. As the older child, and the generally more bookish one, I was...
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He came to me in a dream last night. For a short while, he was alive- still with a yellowed pallor, still weak, still in the hospital gown. But he was conscious. Sitting on a bed. And he could speak. In this dream, he had come back from the land of the dead.
I sat beside...
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