With my rose tinted glasses, all I could see was getting out of the hell-hole that I’d been trapped in for so long; don’t get me wrong—it’s not that I’m not grateful to my dad for having bought this for us (his three children, my two sisters and me, to grow up in) but to maintain it was a pain in the ass, and as the years would pass it only became more and more of a burden on my mom and I (well, my mom really, and then my dad).
And to give you an example, she’d do everything, my mom—mop the floors, wash the clothes, cook the food… and me, I’d get depressed and withdraw basically all the time, and seeing her do everything would only make me more depressed. And as if she didn’t have enough to worry about, now she had me to add to her already overburdened pile, which is when I wondered if enough was enough… both my sisters had now left us and gone, and if we were just able to find a nice flat in a good enough neighbourhood, I was ready to bail.
It took some time for my mom to come around to the idea, but come around she finally did, thank god… dad was basically fine as long as it had a Masjid nearby and a healthy muslim population… which it does, the mosque is literally next door to the building, believe it or not (so my dad plans to walk out the front-door for all of his five prayers amazingly, something which he’d not been able to do ever, not even in his youth) and his best friend stays like a five minute drive away, so you know where he’ll be going every Sunday, with me driving him of course.
And then there’s mom, she’s already decided on the layout of the area, and spoken to the carpenter who’s going to be working on the place—so we’re good to go really—and how and where everything needs to be arranged. I hope this place turns out just the way she wants it to: her no. 1 complaint in the old place was the size of our kitchen… it was tiny, so she’s really going all out this time, which I thought wasn’t far enough cos maybe it could still be bigger… but the architect and she agreed that it was enough, and tomorrow the work’s finally going to start, in all earnestness.
Me, what do I want from all of this, what I always wanted—some peace of mind, my p(ie)ce of mind, really. Which is what I wanted 3 years ago, when the market hadn’t crashed and we’d decided on selling the house… and now this is what I’ve been reduced to, no, it ain’t pretty, but it’s a helluva a lot better than what most people are lucky enough to get, and I ought to be thankful for that, instead of the ungrateful brat I am sometimes… which is also what I’ve noticed about me… trying, I mean really trying and not letting everything affect me so much anymore, or not as much as they used to in the past… so you’re not gonna get the SUV that you wanted, tough. And that bike, yeah, you’ll just have to make do with a scooter, dude—but you know what, maybe it just isn’t my time yet, and it’ll come one day hopefully, and then I can get all those other things… but until then, hey, you gotta learn to crawl before you can walk alright? Of course, I don’t want to make empty promises and suggest to you that any of this is a done deal… far from it, who knows what tomorrow holds, my dad might want to use the money somewhere else… so, like I said, it’s what dreams may come. :)
