There was a time...

There was a woman that lived across my family’s home and she used to give my friends and me strawberry-scented jelly candy. They used to be round and flat, an almost indiscernible indent always in the centre. A rosy soft hue of pink, wrapped in a see-through sheer material that once pulled apart from the treasure inside would crease and crinkle in a million ways. Held against the sun’s rays, light transcends through and disperses into a spectrum of gold and silver. It was unlike anything we had seen.

There was a girl that I called my best friend and she used to microwave my favourite popcorn. Sneaking past her disapproving mother, we would transform into the girls from “Totally Spies!”. Light on our feet and deviously unapologetic, we used to raid her storage for the double butter, salted bag of popcorn. A minute into the pop of the popcorn she would always start to hop around, paranoia sending her to the kitchen door on the lookout for her mother and each time I would pull her back just a few seconds before the microwave would alarm us of our success, and alarm her mother of an unsolicited invasion of her supplies. We would retreat back to her room, celebrating our success with an hour of uninterrupted television time with the "Winx Club".

There was a maid that lived with us and she would create roses from crepe paper. Hands soft yet deft and swift, would with what would have remained to be a sheet of fragile red paper construct the most beautiful roses. Layers on layers, the material would overlap softly over one another; where one ended, the other would start. I would sit beside her on our marble floor staring, transfixed as her fingers would fold and pull on the paper, the paper whispering as they rubbed against itself. Within minutes a plethora of flowers would pile up on the floor, cascading down as they wouldn’t hold still on each other’s uneven surfaces. It was as if she would lose herself in that mere act of crafting and it wasn’t until now that I realized why her eyes would light up like they held a hundred stars within their depths and her lips would stretch, it would seem involuntary, into a wide smile when I would ask if she could make some flowers for me.

I realized: it was an escape. Not just for my maid, but for the lady living across our home and for my friend who would rather spend hours watching episodes with me than converse with her mother. Hardship had come for them long before it would come for me. Life, holding their every living moment in its slender palms, would twist and turn its course with a flick of its fingers and once where their days were filled with joyous seconds turned into ones filled with sorrow. I realized, to feel even a whisper of the happiness from the bygone days they would do anything. The lady had lost her only child to a rare disease, its name my infant brain could not comprehend. My friend lived with parents almost always at each other’s throats, a never-ending outburst of marital bickering, screaming profanities and throwing ultimatums making it heart wrenching to be around either of them. And the maid had seen days of profound poverty forcing her to discard her dream of teaching art and instead slave away her days to earn for her family.

The little girl who would see them every day had never known of their grief. She didn’t ask about their lives because she assumed they had the same as hers. Now, however, as that girl grew into who I am today, I see it. I see them. It does not matter what we all go through, the innocence of childhood would shine like the sun through the candy wrapper, like the stars in her eyes and like the innocence of friendship.