A Journey To Remember

• Jenny Huang, Grade 11
• Poetry
• 2010

His was a life that strove for the impossible. As a child, typical summer afternoons were spent tackling the enormous limbless trees of his realm, or stealing kisses from the landlord’s pretty daughter, whose eyes never wandered beyond the tip of his cap.
Then, growing up, he sailed the rough and weather-beaten seas to conquer the dragons of his destiny; finding instead some distant shores of untouched sands where he dreamt his youth away floating in an endless patch of blue. But it was only there that he caught the eye of Elena – beautiful, fair-haired, siren, nymph Elena. Even now he recalls her toxic perfume – a concoction of apple-blossoms and the savage sea; her wild hungry eyes; and the way her mass of curls looped through his fingers and coiled around his heart… but she had had to wait. The lion was not to be tamed. There were still mountains to be ridden, valleys to be breathed, damsels in distress waiting to be saved.
And so the golden years were spent attempting an impossible feat. Young lovers settled down while he continued collecting and piecing together bits and pieces for a legacy that was to resemble the mismatched parts of a jigsaw puzzle, all be because some idiot had told him to ‘live life to its fullest’. But amongst all the escapades with its music of clicking heels and stage of swishing feathers of cabaret dancers, a poor fisherman’s daughter was waiting quietly by a curb. She wore a plain, sun-bleached shift with moth eaten stockings, and a sad resigned smile. Waiting, she stood, for a man who would love her.
That was all far away now, although that humble, hard-worked life beset with its daily meals of stewed peas and cabbage, and winters of reading by a dying fireplace remains still etched firmly in the lines of his smile. He recalls still also the blueness of the sea – his fountain of youth – the salty taste of Elena, and all the mountains, towns and trees. Even the moment he could no longer climb one.
All this is great for now, when he is old and the tears bespatter his fingers and mix with the ink on the page. Alone, so close to the sky, the thunder echoes through him and all of his history. Clamouring to the outflung door where the sheets flutter out unhindered, he pauses and relinquishes himself to the pounding of the rain, as it beats the feeling back into his withered body. Below, lay the world in all its savage glory.
His past history... he remembers, but cannot remember anymore what is real and what is not. Fact and fiction had long ago melded into one. Perhaps, after all, there was no man who had thus lived and loved and written his memoirs in a house in the sky. Perhaps there was only, ever, a shy and tight-lipped boy, alone with his books, and a nameless old man at a faded desk, writing a story never to be read.