Kring Kring
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11:27:00 pm on March 25, 2008 | # |
If a household never ends a day without finishing the chores, my Ate Lisa and I complete our days in a different way. We had our petty quarrels as a daily routine. Some people say that it’s just normal but I think it is like a sore in the mouth that you keep on biting accidentally.
For the last few months, our house had been under renovation. The construction made everything in the house chaotic. Most of our things were packed in sacks and placed in a vacant room. Dust particles in the air stimulated my allergic rhinitis, resulting to my hot-headedness. An argument couldn’t be avoided in the household with everything in the house a mess. For me, who usually returned home from my boarding house in Mintal twice a month, the house was unlivable. I believe that a home should be comfortable, but that time it seemed like a storm had passed there.
The night was hot and dusty, my head aching from the successive sneezes. Sleepiness already visited me when my sister stopped me on my way to bed.
“Can you help me find my Human Development book in the storage room before you sleep?”
“Why can’t you do it yourself?”
She answered me with a look that warned me of an oncoming argument. With resignation, I opened a few sacks in that murky room, rummaged amongst its contents, feeling intensely miserable for every sneeze that I made. At times like this, I asked myself why I had a sister like her – so demanding and quite insensitive. I continued rummaging in the other sacks, tying and untying one after the other with much contempt, cursing under my breath.
While I was trying my best in the trial-and-error adventure of finding my sister’s book, I found an old sketch pad with my sister’s name on it. It revealed her childish sketches of nature – trees, flowers, a landscape of the school, and our house; but what really caught my attention was her drawing of a crying dog with a balloon text just above its big ears. Suddenly, I was still six again and my sister was seven. Ate Lisa would always hug me whenever she caught me off-guard. As a reaction, I would shout at her, never thinking that it hurt her feelings.
“Don’t hug me. I don’t like you!” I shrugged and pushed her away. The force that I exerted made her lose her balance and fall. For that, she got bruised and we didn’t speak for several hours. Every time I glimpsed at her, I found her busying herself with her sketch pad. Later that night, she came to me, the sketch pad in her hands and said, “I’m sorry for hugging you that tight. I didn’t want to make you angry with me. The bruises hurt, but it’s okay. Mom said you should say ‘sorry’ too.”
I ignored her so she placed the sketch in my hands and walked away. Opening the sketch pad, I saw her drawing of a dog with big ears, big eyes, and big tears falling on its large cheeks. A balloon text explained why the dog had been crying: “I’m crying because my sister doesn’t want me anymore. Huhu.” I stared at the back of my sister for a while, then turned my gaze to the sketch pad in my hands. I looked at it with an odd feeling of remorse, guilt, and shame.
In a second, I thought that I was back during the days when pride still overwhelmed me and ‘sorry’ was too difficult to utter. Then, I realized that I was standing in the middle of a dusty room, looking for a book my Ate Lisa had requested me to find. I took a glance at my sister, smiled. A simple request that didn’t hurt couldn’t compare to what I did to her back then. I wasn’t able to give her my apology that time so I thought that a simple sacrifice might make up for my mistake.
Luckily, I found the book ate needed. As I handed it to her, I placed the sketch pad beneath it, smiled, and gave her a hug.
