A Father I Never Knew

Today is the 3rd week of my creative writing course with Sharon Bakar. I missed last week because I was just plain stupid - no made up excuses to give.

However, today's class was very interesting. We were to first write a word to describe a feeling and then write a word to match the colour associated with that feeling. Then it was a food we associate with that colour and then sound, texture, something I said or thought of today and then an object I have handled and a name of a person I knew or have known that was associated.

It sounds like a start of something really random! And it was really silly....

My sentence came out to be...

Blue was the colour I saw as I hummed away while sleeping comfortably on my father's bed and chewing upon a rice cracker.

Next, Sharon told us to write a story out of this sentence! We were given 10 minutes and here it is...

I can't believe that I was seeing blue but the colour seemed to pervade my mind's eye. It was the colour of my dreams, the object of my search and the goal of my destiny. I didn't seem to know why blue seemed so elusive. Perhaps, I was just placing a colour subconsciously to an inner peace I was always searching.

Was I looking in the wrong place? My father's bed didn't seemed too bad a place to search for what I longed for. A sense of belonging? A sense that I had been loved. Perhaps it is just that I had a father once? I don't know. I never knew him but I now own his bed.

Blue is the colour I see while lying on his bed.There is no picture of him in my mind. Blue seemed to have replaced his face. The smoothness of the sheets seemed to have replaced his touch and I just felt numbed. I tried to hum a song to bring feeling to my senses but all I did was spit rice cracker crumbs all over like hopes and dreams shattered.

I realised that was all I will ever know of my father. The white sheets were all that was left. The smelly old mattress seemed pregnant with emotions and memories I would never know. The strong bed frame echoes a father's love and security I would never have felt. How lovely was the song...