Remembering Mama...

Dear Mama,

To say how I terribly miss you is a sheer understatement. It's been ten years since you said goodbye to us. How time quickly flies when every pain you had to endure, every struggle you had to battle to defy death is still vivid in my memory! The multitude of medical apparatus attached to your body, the countless medicine you had to take, the agonizing sound of your breaths: I confess I still wake up at night wishing everything was just a bad dream. Acceptance is a gesture I still steer clear of. But when I realize I haven't spoken the word Mama in a decade now, I feel defeated.

Life went on, though, as if a consolation. But it was far from normal: the forced maturity, the misspent youth and the question of identity. (Normalcy, it pains me to know, is something I could never reclaim.) Thus my introvert personality. Thus, my twisted set of convictions.

Happiness, it seems, is an elusive circumstance. There's only isolation, angst and melancholy. Time and again, I ponder on the highs and lows of my life, an unmistakable missing link always sufraces: YOU.

Perhaps, you couldn't be much prouder that we didn't turn out to be as total screw-ups, only confused and lost. Yes, there were times of near-surrender but I pressed on: what doesn't kill you makes you only stronger.

I've already grown past naievete. I now am capable of giving love. I no longer fear death. It's part of the natural order, I'm told: birth, unrequited love and, ultimately, death.

If death means an anticipation of the bliss that it brings on being with you again, then I'm glad to know that everything will finally come full circle. And maybe happiness will not be as elusive as it seems.

'Tis.

Your loving son,
J.