Dylan Ng - Issue 35

I'm Dylan Ng, a final year university student.

Contact me at ndylang@gmail.com

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A Morning Like Any Other

I woke up that morning, crying. Not tears, mind you. Never tears. But my lungs were heaving, my eyes were stingray wet, and I was full of snot, nose to throat to the churning in my stomach. What had changed, to put me in such a state? It was hard to say. The morning was like any other. The view outside my window was still that of the leisure centre car park, with the same PTs and gym regulars parked in the same spots. The sky was still quintessentially British — grey, with a touch of drizzly white — and it doused the world in that familiar, coloursapped greyscale. My desk was arranged as it always was; a single, messy stack of scrawled-upon paper, and a laptop on a stand. My bed was still creaky, and the mattress still had a mummified dent in the vague and squiggly shape of me. Night had swept through the city and touched nothing, a phantom that had blown through town without a fuss and moved onto the next place, too quick and lightfooted to have even left a mark on the whole world that it had flown past. Nothing had changed, the Earth had been held in stasis for the seven hours that I had passed from consciousness. Yet still, I was crying, and I had not been crying before.

I’ve never imagined that I would live past thirty, she had said. She last said it in a dream that hadn’t quite crystallised into proper memory, the one that had just gone by. The dregs of its ending were still knocking about in my brain, lazily milling about with their morning coffees, lightly stretching in preparation for their inevitable taking off later today, from which they would join the other contents of last night’s dreaming in obscurity. In them, I was left only with a shape. Not even a thought or an idea; just the hollow outline of one.

 I hadn’t dreamt of her in months, years even. I hadn’t seen her in that time either. I briefly wondered before I got up why she had chosen last night of all nights to visit, and what else she could’ve done or said in that time to leave me so affected. It was only a brief thought, though. As soon as my feet touched the carpeted floor, the static bursting from the dust and tickling their soles, the remaining flecks of dream took flight, startled by the sudden slam of skin to ground, and I was left a blank canvas, an empty shell ready to be filled by the meat of an oncoming day.

That day truly started when I was at breakfast. Our houseshare was a cold, plastic place, with gloss on its walls and ceilings, a ploy by the landlord to try and make it look more homely. It didn’t work. Instead, it made the whole thing look fragile and quickly manufactured, like a cheap movie set. If it had a spirit word, one word that truly embodied its being, it would be acetone. That might’ve come to mind because the flat smelt of mothballs, somewhat counterintuitively.

The kitchen was the epitome of this effect. Its colours were as muted as the British weather outside, and any personality came from the little trinkets that we’d thrown around to make this cave our home. A postcard on the fridge, a Funko Pop on a countertop, a plethora of rainbow coloured knives. My favourite was a poster starring some ethnically ambiguous muscle man flexing a bicep in a gauche, ironically chauvinistic way. It said: This kitchen is state-owned property of the Chinese-Soviet coalition, written in bleak black Hollywood bold above the man’s head. I don’t know why that tickled me so much; I think it’s because it was a little flicker of life, of self-awareness, in the kind of place that you could imagine a geriatric had or would soon die in. That, and all the other cheap little things my flatmates had managed to find, gave a rugged, homemade feel to the place, and only served to highlight the dreary, flat paint over the rest of what was meant to be our home. 

I was frying an egg, as I often did on most mornings, when my dad called, with the usual questions.

‘Have you texted your mother?’ he asked, a disembodied voice plugged into my ear, ticking off the checklist of motions that we went through every morning. Much like the world outside, nothing would change, yet we still did it anyway, in case something had.

‘I have,’ I said.

‘She’s worried, you know. And even if she doesn’t always show it in the— the healthiest — way, she loves you. And with everything going on back home—’

He paused. Somehow, the wrinkled aging in his cheeks was seeping into the silent gap he had left to find the right words.

‘I know, Dad,’ I said, not wanting him to stew on trivial things for too long, ‘I’ll call her later.’

‘Good. Then, I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Love you.’

‘Love you.’ There was a click and a beep, and the disembodied voice stopped buzzing through my earphones. 

I’d like to say now that I do love him, and it was no different on that morning. I have always loved my father. He’s family, and he raised me. How could I not love him? Yet anybody who might’ve thought otherwise from that phone call is right in a sense. They’re right in the fact that those words could not have been said with any less meaning or weight. Love you. They’d been worn out from overuse — not imbued with anything substantial by the context or the thought or the feeling behind it. No, it was less than even that. It was a husk of language. Every time it’d been said, it had been an acknowledgement of the previous time that it was said — the first time being three years before, when I moved away, mind you — and each time, it had become hollowed out further and further into an intangible shadow of itself, just that little bit less every time. By the time that we’d had that conversation that morning, there was nothing left of those words. We were scraping dribbles of saucy mush from a fully eaten plate.

I sometimes think about whether that would’ve been different, had the things that had transpired over the past few years not happened in the way that they did. I might’ve spent more of the holidays at home, had more to talk about with my parents, even come back to go mini-golfing on the weekends, or whatever it is that put-together families do. But I think it’s safe to say that we were not, and could never be, a put-together family, not with the hole that’d been punctured through what was supposed to be an immutable bond, thicker than water and all that crap. There was no point in pretending otherwise either, because that hole, that absence, it pervaded us every time we spoke, or even sat silently in the same room. It was ever-present, and how could it not be? My sister deserved nothing less. 

I’ve never imagined that I would live past thirty, she had said. I looked out of the window, and thought about whether or not she’d been right. It struck me then that I would probably never know. As black flakes crackled and spread out like varicose veins across the bottom of my egg, I daydreamed all of the lives that my sister might've had, and might now be living.