With Love by Terribly Tiny Tales

Author:Terribly Tiny Tales [Tiny, Terribly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789353057879
Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited
Published: 2020-02-05T00:00:00+00:00

By Khushi Bajaj

Dear Stranger,

You have kind eyes, ones that have grown tender and patient, like dying sunlight. You listen like you have nowhere else to go, no world to return to. Your morals do not murder the vulnerability of what it is to be human. To you, I am more skin, less idea. Ironical, I know. So, it is you I write to; you who would see me undress in the truest sense.

All families are dysfunctional. Some just pretend better.

When your home is sinking, you do everything in your bloody power to keep it afloat. Six-year-old me cried. I cried and prayed to a deaf God; hands clutched tight, breath held long enough and a tiny, scared heart shattering with dull thuds against concrete fear.

Home was a cacophony of abuse and trauma. I saw it grow on mother’s fine-haired arms and vague, rosy collarbones. Skin bruising and bleeding underneath the ruin that father was. Walls damp from the want of warmth, tongues weak from the burden of mean words, air stale from the untimely death of innocence. Home was a crime scene I slept in. Father was the criminal . . . who sang me lullabies.

Father was a monster who kissed me goodnight. He was a monster whose warm chest calmed me down, who made me laugh, who picked me up when I was too tired to walk, who cried when I got a fever, who taught me cycling and to spell my name, who fed me lunch, who kept me from hurting, who loved me and whom I loved back.

What do you call a daughter who loves the man who hurt her mother? What do you do when you still love the person who scarred your childhood? What do you do when you forget how to hold a grudge?

All families are dysfunctional. Some just decay sooner.

—Rewaya

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