A Moment of Clarity

She had stared bleakly into the some sort of bluish-greyness, ringed by a charcoal band. This is the colour of my grandmother’s eyes. She was not looking out of them but rather looking upon the surface of those blue grey corneas.

One line on her face traversed the smooth surface of her skin, burrowing into it like a crevasse formed over the million years of earth’s formation. From where I was standing, her memories could very well have been formed at the birth of these crevasses, millions of years ago. However, beneath the bluish-greyness, it told me that these memories have came from the past millennia to meet us today. Four crevasses meant that my grandmother had traversed more that I could imagine. Together with the mountainous nose, the changing levels of the depths in her eyes, and the smooth, ploughs of her lips, she held a landscape of memories on her face.

The moments of clarity for my grandmother are unusual. Clarity of the past comes like a surprise birthday party that you thought everyone had forgotten.  Clarity of the present extends its gratitude so seldomly that we throw another surprise party in graciousness. The day we navigated her apartment building presented one of those gracious moments.

We had circumnavigated the block around the complex and had taken a rest at the first bench. From the bench, we strolled back carefully across the pavilion of the apartment building where my grandmother lives. Tiled seats and mosaic flooring shimmer across the pavilion. It is an incredible sight of thumbnail size; green square blocks lined one after another, spanning across a platform the size of a football field. The wetness on the tiles is a reminder of the recent rain. It glistened in staccato like the bubbles that reach the surface of your glass of champagne. The dampness doesn’t dry beneath the towering oaks of twenty storeys. Rather, I imagine the droplets on the tiled floor gathering like children at a preschool, holding hands, and waiting for the wind to sweep them up and above so to land on another complex across the road. However, all this ravishing beauty could only be found in my retrospective thoughts. The fear of my grandmother slipping on these tiles outweighed the fanciful imageries. The place was a slippery slide at the water parks for the geriatrics. However, rather than stretched out faces like children in fearful joy, there are stretched out faces of sheer terror. Twenty more lines are added in an instant to those that had already been eighty years in the making. The glistening staccato are trickery for my grandmother’s failing eyes. The towering grandeur of the building eats the sunshine that many are already deprived of in a city permanently layered with smog. The dampness of the ground can hardly be handled by those with the stamina to walk to two legs, let alone by those whom have acquired an extra one for support. It doesn’t make sense.

So we walked carefully across the pavilion because her legs were now like fibreboard. I wanted to get her home, despite the huffing and puffing that escaped when she attempted to gather herself at the bench. She was gathering her breath, gathering her heartbeats so that she could order them in a regular rhythm, gathering her splintered bones and smoothing them out into strong legs again. There was a lot of gathering that had to be done. I just wanted to get her home. In the safety of a dry floor, cushioned couch, and more importantly, a handy phone call away for help if needed.

It was coming up to six o’clock. Dinner was closing in before her eight o’clock bedtime. When we arrived at the apartment, she fell deep onto the couch sighing over and over, repeating ‘Oh… I am useless. What is the point of living’. I starred at her as she tried to rub her legs back to life. I am burrowed in a frown, lips slightly ajar, waiting for the healing words to come out of my mouth. All I could come up with was an echo of a ‘No…’ I had no idea what it was like for her. How could anyone understand someone else’s pain? Perhaps if she could muster the belief that with each breathe she could release the pains from her legs. Particles of pain would gather in her mouth and out it would go. Out the window, falling gingerly upon the pavilion below, damning it for being so damp and utterly scary to walk upon. Could she? Could this possibly make her day any better?

I looked out the window and formulated that the light of the day meant it was dinnertime. The sun was setting in greyness of the smoggy sky and beeping horns in peek hour traffic was the alarm for dinner.

‘Granny! Do you have to take your pills before you eat?’ I barked into her despairing rant.

She replied with a sudden return of someone I once knew, ‘Of course! I am getting it now.’ The tragic drone of her despair momentarily gathered up and swallowed back to the depths of her legs. She pushed herself up from the sofa and I leaned over to help her. She followed the call of the pills living in the kitchen and I watched from where I was standing.

The dramatic change of voice had hit me like a surprise party. My burrowing frown like a valley of my brow began to rise like a mountain. My chest rose, mimicking the return of my grandmother’s stamina. These surprises were surprise parties for me, and not so much for her. I graciously celebrated the return of my grandmother from my childhood. She had had a moment of clarity.