Random Recollections Of Reality

• Obed Oei, Grade 12
• Short Story
• 2008

The air was filled with conflict and our tongues in profanity. She screamed of the absence of satisfaction in our relationship where I remained unwilling to succumb to her pleads in all my stubbornness. My saying “If such brokenness exists within a bond, it should exist no longer” was responded by her slamming of the door with such a fulmination, taking only her possessions and leaving our memory-filled shoeboxes and refulgent photo frames sitting on the table.

With nothing more to have said, she left.

Standing here at the present time, the shoebox now decorated with tears calls out my name with all intention to cause regret upon my sorry soul. It opens its lid and the memories dance like a dream doused in dreariness through the collections of pitifully painted photographs and the long love letters which lack a familiar love. The smiles and joy previously provided by the presence of these photographs are present no more as all have lost their meaning caused by the now broken hinges of the door which cannot uphold the bridge between us any longer.

And I question “who is at fault?”

The refulgent photo frame standing proud next to the shoebox attempts to comfort me by the projection of a memory. On the face of the photo frame; the sky was blue and the sun smiled, silently scorching slowly the ground we stood upon in front of the anonymous stranger who in the end conceded to recording this memory. The harmony in these colours which fails to longer please my sorrow proves of no use but to inflict upon me a sense of compunction in the thought of possibly…staying with her?

Should I then have resumed?

The clock close by ticks to remind me that reality resides and from my dreamy synapse I break away to find me now half past making sense of the situation. I still love those luscious lips which last time loosened the constrictions of loneliness. Her daring, glaring eyes which caused a snaring upon me, capturing my heart and even until now, the remains of such a fragmented veteran from this battlefield we call ‘life’. The other half is deluged by doubt in determining whether or not wisdom serves in mending this crevasse which separates me from her.

Would it be worth it after all?

But…relationships are like the summer grass, they sway so effortlessly and so simply that fragility defines their nature. They are all identical in their appearance and all so easily fluttered by the overwhelming tempest.

And now I see, such things prove futile.

Yet here I am, with a picture frame in hand and I hesitantly celebrate myself, and what I assume shall you assume? For every atom belonging to me as good should it belong to you? I loaf and invite only my soul, I lean and loaf at my ease… observing a spear of summer grass.