A Requiem For A Dream

What Else Can I Say?

You know, for once, an entry will be about something that is totally serious and somber. Make no mistake, there is no flippancy involved in this entry: I write everything here without irony, sarcasm, or insincerity. This may come as a surprise, but on this I'm serious as death.

Today is my mother's 47th birthday, or it would be her 47th birthday if she were alive. She was born on July 28, 1958. Here's to you mother: you are in a better place now, I hope.

But the strange thing is, I have trouble conjuring up sad emotions. And maybe you are right, maybe I'm just a cold-blooded monster with no feelings. And I would have nothing to say to you: what else can I say? I just never really found out who mother was from herself while she was alive. She left me when I was one, and I didn't see her again till I was 11. And she died when I was 14. I was young back then, I didn't know how to deal with impending death. So I acted the only way I knew how: I avoided dealing with it.

So in some ways, my mother was a stranger to me. Sure, my family members told me about her life, and I can honestly say I know who she was as a person, but only from a third-person point of view. I knew what she did, why she did it, and I guess abstractly, I appreciate many things she has done. But there is that link of emotions missing, something that I can't really put my finger on. It's sort of like reading other people's books. I can understand, enjoy, and analyze them on a purely intellectual level, but I can never really understand and view those books as the people who wrote them.

Make no mistake, I love my mother, more than I show. But the love I have for my mother is a third-person love, like how people love their heroes. They love their heroes because they know that their heroes did something good for them. That's my love for my mother. I can't love her as a person would love another person: faults and all. Because I didn't know her as one person would know another; I never had a chance to hate her, and you can never truly love a person until you've had a chance to hate him first. I guess things happened too quickly back then, when I was young and scared, although back at the time I didn't know I was scared.

And that is my only regret in life: not knowing my mother as a human being with flaws, eccentricities, and quirk. She is more like a perfect memory, a song whose harmonies and rhythm are flawless, which betrays its very un-life-likeness. And that, my friends, is more painful than you can ever imagine. It's terrifying, as if there is a void that's sucking up the sorrow you ought to feel for a loved one. It is not something that I would wish for anyone else to experience.

So the only thing I can possibly say to my mother is that I love her, and will always love her. What else can I say? She's just Weijing Zhou, who gave birth to a Lechuan Zhou, not Mom, not to me.

I apologize if this stuff is too heavy-handed, as I realize that this entry is very personal. And some of you may use that most derogatory of terms to describe this entry: emo. Believe you me, I too, if I were not me, make the same claim if I read this entry. But this is just something that I have to write about without being ironic and smart-alecky.

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

Posted by humanflyz at July 28, 2005 11:09 PM | TrackBack