:: Fool's Paradise ::

The odds and ends, collected by various whims and stored away for discordant fancies, flooded to life with a careless click of the naked light. I stood surveying my closet―the proverbial storeroom where my Bogeyman fears was tucked within alongside things that were bought and once cherished, needed and now discarded, valued and since forgotten. My sister wanted to paint―I couldn't help to wonder, when her ten-year-old impulses, pretty and petulant as they are now, give way to a certain grit that is adult as it is apathetic, would I be ready, would I not ache for the lost of these innocent demands?―and I was to look through the elaborate junk most families are capable of never getting rid of for my old art supplies.

"What do you want to paint?" I had asked her, half mindlessly; my coffee was still hot in my mug, and my Saturday papers were still untouched. Maybe colour pencils will do, darling; or crayons. I know where those are―on the top shelf in your room along with your drawing papers―I thought, in a reflex moment reeking of private ostentation.

She looked at me with curious question. "Did you always know what you wanted to paint?"

My thoughts got caught in my throat, as did my memories. What an avid little artist I was then. Years of art school didn't amount for nothing; I had the tenacity, if not the talent, and I let my art capture my imagination in colours and textures and prolific truths. And no, I didn't always know what I wanted to paint. That was the esthetic elegance of art. You never really know.

I smiled at her. "No, you're right, I didn't always know." I gulped down my coffee; the papers can wait.

***

Our storeroom. We've been living in this house for the last thirteen years now, and for the magpies in all of us―no, let's keep this, no, you never know when you'd need that, no―we've kept bags and boxes of arcane knick-knacks.

It's almost as if time cannot touch the dusty dimension of the storage saint; fuck the new millenium! Here in my storeroom, the 70s is safe and saved in yellowing photo albums, the 80s is bubble-wrapped with restro respect, and the 90s―still fairly new, wouldn't you say!―is packed and guarded with quondam nostalgia.

My mother's cheerful scrawl became names to cardboxed memories: I found old toys (of lego blocks and headless dolls, birds and beasts that speak no more!), old books, old clothes, old creations―the old me. I smiled―wry and waterly―at my childish creations, my precocious possessions, all still kept and sealed with tepid patience. Thanks mom.

I found the art supplies that I once thought would become the tools of my career: paints and chalk pastels, sculpting tools (all twelve blades), a variety of brushes, boxes of pencils, sharpened by hand. Xiaojie's tools, was my mother's label to this particular box. How apt and how sad; I grew out of my dreams before my dreams could grow out of me. Their better ressurection came only on my sister's impulsive want to paint.

And then I saw them, the shoeboxes.

My art supplies were stacked next to several shoeboxes on the same shelf, shoeboxes I knew contained newspaper clippings of my parents' published talent. My mother's stories and my father's poems in lilting Chinese confidence, printed in newspapers almost three decades ago. Where are you now? What brought on the death of you and you―two romantic scribes with melancholic madness for the written world? Was it us? Did the blossoming of your family wilted the verve and vivacity of the author in you and the poet in you?

Because if it was, I'm sorry. Because you, and you, could have been much greater than this―I love that you're my father and that you're my mother, but you could have been an author, a writer of grace and grandeur, and you, you could have been a poet, your prose purposeful and poised with your talent and taste.

You could have been so much more than a shoebox of dreams. And I'm sorry, because beyond the doors of our storeroom, of this clandestine closet stuffed to the brim with dying dreams, we live the fool's paradise of wasted wealth, rich in the reality of our everydays, but bankrupt in the possibility of our forgotten potential.

***

"Do you like my painting?" my sister asked, later.

I watched her colours calmly take shape with a certain maternal pride. "Yes I do," I told her. But, I do not like mine.