The Edge

One of the earliest memories I have is of standing on the edge of the ocean, watching it mutilate a ship, far off on the horizon. I could hear screaming - loud, clear - over the sound of the waves breaking on the shore. Then a hand, over my shoulders, grabbing and pulling me away from the violence of the waters.

I wonder of it is a true memory, or something my mind fabricated. It would have been impossible to hear the screams over the sound of the waves and yet, I remember them as clearly as ever – sharp, loud, wailing over everything else. They almost had a shape, those screams. But I had never been near an ocean in my entire life. My mom told me that. In fact, she had never been near it her entire life too, and not even grandma. Maybe my father had, but none of us could be sure. In any case, even if he had, he would not have had a chance to take me to one. He left before I was born. My grandma – my mom’s mother – said my great-grandfather was a sailor and he had once witnessed a storm, so devastating, he had had nightmares about it for months afterwards. He would shout for help, in his dreams; cry for people my grandma did not know. He died a year after the storm. The doctors could not decide what he had died of.

My grandma died on my twelfth birthday. She was eating a piece of cake my mom had baked for us when she complained of a slight pain in her chest and collapsed immediately afterwards. For minutes we thought she was joking. She used to have a strange sense of humor. For example, she would sometimes wake my mom in the middle of the night by touching a hot cup of tea to her cheek, or holding her nose for a while until she gasped for air and woke up. She would put dirty laundry with the clean clothes or clean the kitchen with bathroom rugs. She wasn’t always this bad, but it was slowly getting worse. So, when she died in earnest, it was hard to believe it was not one of her terrible jokes. When we did realize she had died (of a heart-attack, the doctor said), my mom cried for days and could not do anything else. This meant, I had to cook, clean, get myself ready for school, inform the cleaners, she worked for, and in general, take care of myself and her. I did not know if we had relatives who needed to be informed and when I tried to ask mom, she wailed, went to the only room in the house and shut herself inside for a month.

By the time she felt better, she had lost her job and we had run out of money. Things fell apart quickly after that. We sold everything we could and moved to a tiny room we rented in a small house. The other rooms were rented by people in situations like ours but I never really got to know them. Mom would warn me against talking to any of them, even the children. She got a new job selling Wonder Brooms but she wasn’t very good at it. The door-to-door left her exhausted and with a constant pain in the back she incessantly complained about. I was moved to the local school where education was cheap and lunch was free. It was not a bad place but the students did not study and the teachers looked annoyed, confused or bored. The only friend I managed to make transferred to another school in the first month. I tried to make friends after that, but my heart really wasn’t in it. Mom said I was becoming complacent – not only about making friends, but about everything – education, chores, helping around, but really, I was doing the best I could.

As years passed, I noticed how my mom was slowly turning into grandma. The first time I noticed it was on a Sunday. I must have been in my early twenties then, for I remember feeling grateful there was no work that morning. Mom was not in the room, which was not something unusual. I assumed she had picked up a Sunday shift; she was still with Wonder Broom. It was only when I went to the bathroom, did I realize something was wrong.

We had three other rooms on our floor and everyone shared a bathroom. After years of fighting, everyone pretty much had a schedule for washing, showering and peeing that did not coincide with the others. My mom was usually one of the first people to use the bathroom in the morning. I was somewhere in the middle.

That day when I reached the bathroom, I was met by a group of angry neighbors.

“There you are! Get her out. She’s been there since morning. She can’t hog the toilet like that!”

It took me a while to understand, but it seemed like mom had been inside the bathroom for almost an hour. I felt panicked but what could I do? After I had tried banging the door, asking her if she was alright, if she was hurt and all that, we decided to break the door open. When we did, I found her sitting on the toilet, all clean and laughing. She said she had thought it would be funny if she locked herself inside and refused to come out. I should have taken her to a doctor then, but we never had enough money. Even with my job (I was working at a movie theater), there was never enough money.

After that incident, it was as if something changed in her. She started locking herself in the bathroom several times a month and the landlord had to get the lock fixed each time. We were asked to leave the place soon after. I found us a tiny studio in the outskirts and tried to get her to behave. But she was finding new tricks every day. Once she poured a bucket of cold water all over me as I slept and got angry when I shouted at her. She got kicked out of her job for leaving the brooms at the front doors of every house she went to one day, and for telling the management she had managed to sell them all. She died when she added bits of rat poison to the porridge, put it in a corner to lure in rats, forgot why she had put it there and ate it herself. Or at least, that is what I thought had happened when I came back home from work to find her curled up in a corner, dead.

When I look back at what happened to my grandma and then my mom, I wonder if it is really a surprise what happened to me.

I often think about great-grandfather – the one grandma mentioned. The sailor who saw the storm and could not sleep afterwards. No one knew how or why he died. When I think about him, I think about the ship being ravaged in the ocean, tossing and turning and breaking bit by bit, helpless again a power it has no knowledge of. I also think of the ship when I think about grandma and mom. I am slowly getting to know about the power of the ocean myself, as I grow older. I can see now what they found funny in those little pranks they played. The mischief. Or why they did not worry when they lost a job or a foot.

*

I have been living on the streets for almost a year. And really, it is not bad. There are people who do not mind sharing food and water, or money to buy those things. I sometimes make mischief and annoy some people, but most of them know I mean no harm. It’s all in good fun. Maybe it is the only way to keep the ocean at bay.