Tick. Tock. Tick. 

The clock mocks me, each tick like a tedious flash of what I was, what I could have been. My teacher’s voice reverberates and echoes in a hypnotising cascade through the classroom. Bored, I peer down at my phone and gaze over the folders of my life, a childhood and a world at my fingers. Stuck. Frozen. The comforting smile of my grandmother is hidden somewhere here, barricaded by metal and plastic, waiting to be displayed behind tempered glass. The reason for my existence, my knowledge and my place on this earth, all packed tightly into a human vessel, now held in my hands. 

***

I was born into a busy place. In this world, smoke and gasoline smothered the air, the summer rain was my contentment, and the people spoke with loud voices. Motorbikes roared to and fro and in and out of the house, and aunties roamed about in organised chaos. Summers were scorching hot, and the humidity clung like moths around an open bulb. I lived in it for as long as I knew and to me, this world made sense. 

But the idea of leaving it did not. The idea of why my world was no longer safe, didn’t make sense. The idea of why I had to leave my world by myself didn’t either, but the haunting plea in my grandmother’s eyes made it make sense. 

This new place was upside down. A wonderland that I did not understand. The air was cool and light, absent of gasoline. The sun rose and set over the horizon, and I was able to see it. The birds sang in the morning mist and I was able to hear it. School was a foreign land of strange words and people I couldn’t decipher. People moved slower, walking through me as if I wasn’t there at all, as if I walked on the ceilings. 

But eventually, I started adjusting and the outlandish became ordinary. Each conversation I held made a trophy in my mind and the slivers of sunlight I started to let in sparkled upon their surface. They built up, the bronze, the silver and the gold piling up. My memories and my grandmother, my world and my home, slowly lost its place in me. Being buried beneath much flashier achievements and westernised behaviours. Contained and locked away like forbidden treasures, its remains were plastered within the walls of my camera roll as it peeled off my mind like old paint. As more of this new world made sense to me, the place of roaring motorbikes and organised chaos became my new upside down. 

***

Clicking on a photo of my grandmother, she unfolds from code. She is sitting under a struggling light bulb that is barely able to illuminate beyond the circular wooden table and plastic stools. Her eyes flash glimpses of doubt and desperate yearning. Each plea etches deep within the valleys of her face and ingrains a permanent gloss over her tired eyes which she masks with a loving smile. She holds me in her arms. My toothless smile, chubby arms and mischief, held in her lap. 

Would she be happy that she is encapsulated in pixels? If she saw me now, would she recognise me? Would she recognise my disfigured face? 

The clock continues to tick, the teacher continues to speak, and the children continue to laugh behind me as the bell screeches for the last time that day. Without realising, my hands are cramping, clinging onto my phone as if it was her face. My fingers are white and my palm patches with red and white spots. I let go, hoping to run away from this uncomfortable reckoning with myself. The reckoning that in her passing, she took the last bits of my world with her. The world that I didn’t hold onto, the world that I let become my upside down, the world that I was too cowardly not to keep. I hold her in both hands for another second before the screen goes dark, before the kids start running out of the classroom, and everything goes back to the way it was. I tell her how sorry I am that her hopes became buried and lost in me. I tell her before running out of the classroom just like the others.