december flower

When I was a kid I used to be very happy when December came. Cloudy afternoons that dragged lazily into drizzly evenings, then going out at night when the rain had stopped completely, leaving wet, dark sands that reflected a thousand tiny stars under street lamp shine.

I used to stomp on them, amused by the fact that I couldn't erase those stars and by the rustling sound they made against the bottom of my shoes. Until a parent or both called me, that is.

Oh and don't let get me started on midnight wind that found its way through the window sills into my bedroom, and the sound of thunder someplace afar! In rainy seasons I managed to wake up a lot at night, sometime near midnight is the best time to listen to nature's sound.

Mornings were kind of hazy. Not always rain-free, but most of the time my classmates and I got into the classroom dry. Learning is a hundred times more fun when sunlight wasn't too hard on our juvenile eyes. Even the teachers seemed kinder and smiled a lot more.

In one of those days a flower called December flower bloomed in our garden. Nobody admitted of planting it, but it couldn't just grew by itself, like the tuber had been carried from some other place by a rat, right? Right?

I don't remember much about the flower, but I remember that it had the color red. It's not the bold red like the roses had, in fact the color was so common, so everyday-ish. We happily welcomed the flower not because of its astounding beauty, but because everything around us was staged to make us do so. Happy people tend to be more accepting and less judgmental, I guess.

...

......

I am now very judgmental. I have been hawking my talents like snack on the street — Do you need a ghostwriter? A translator? How about a typewriter?— and thinking that any guy who doesn't work as hard as I do yet managed to get richer than me must be a corrupt official, while any girl who works less hard than I do yet managed to get richer than me must be a... you know what it is I wanted to say.

This December I don't notice the rain, I do not observe sweet winds caressing my arms. I spent half my time writing, half my time looking for new clients. It seems like writers are spawning faster and faster while writing jobs are getting sparser and sparser. I will consider myself lucky if I can put on a new robe and go to a nice dinner with some friends for one time in this month. For one time after a few months, actually.

你在干嘛？今天快乐吗？

*No, 'typewriter' is not a product of any mistyping by me. Do you need typewriter(s)? Give me email address(es) to send price quotations to!

• 
• 
• 
• 
•