Aeroplanes

Not chronologically;

My 21 year old scribble....

Can we pretend that airplanes

In the night sky are like shooting stars?

I could really use a wish right now

Wish right now, wish right now

Yeah, she could really have used a dream or a genie or a wish then.

Eyes shut. Curled in the back seat of the car.

Four hours into a nine hour car journey.

Detested travel. Detested car journeys. Detested family pride.

Detested the education that caused the family pride.

She knew it was the single most important day of the year for the family.

And, the single most thing in her life that had made her unhappy.

Unhappy for 18 of 21 years.

She knew it was the very reason her parents had gone to Saudi Arabia to earn money.

Had their religious beliefs penetrated by merciless eyes and tongues for it.

Then moved to New Zealand in the blind pursuit of it.

So the detestable education could be more detestable in its foreign, dollar hungry form.

She knew that tomorrow wasn’t the end of it.

There was more.

Right now she could only analyse blood under microscopes.

She didn’t even have the qualification to tell the patient what the results were.

She opened her eyes.

 And all the pandemonium and all the madness

There comes a time where you fade into the blackness

Gazed sleepily out of the window.

The landscape she had got to know so well

From three years in the wilderness.

In the madness. In the blackness.

And, yet this landscape was not her own.

It was a distant land; with foreign thoughts, and tongues.

To embrace was to lose your cultural heritage

To resist was to not blend in and make friends.

But, that’s just how the story unfolds

And, yet the car-family were singing along.

Embracing the song.

The proud parents sat in the front.

The Single most important day of Their year was tomorrow.

The elder sister sat next to her teasing the younger (freer) brother.

She had done this all the year before.

But;

With pride.

She knew her duty to the family.

It was to be educated.

Educated in the way her family chose.

Then she would be

Free.

Free

To marry the man her parents chose.

Then she would have everything a 25 year old would want.

It was only a week ago she cajoled her quiet sister

To actually graduate.

To let it be a day of graduation.

Of family pride.

And not fulfilment.

She said the parents only needed a photo of her in her robe and cap in front of the university building.

Then they would be happy.

Then they could show the family back home.

Then they could frame it on the wall

And tell their neighbours how their second daughter is now qualified.

She told her it was the least she could do for the parents who had paid for her education.

Who had supported her when she needed it.

(like the time when she was 17; stressed; depressed; and at the point of rebellion, and her parents didn’t talk to her till she snapped out of it)

She could have really used a wish right then.

She conceded.

It was the least she could do for her parents.

She shut her eyes.

Blackness was comfort.