Instalment XV – Wherein our little heroine is imbued with wisdom

Tales from the Tropics

Hello dear readership, I am still recovering from the weekend. Penning anything terribly insightful is beyond my capacity right now. It was a full house. My grandmother, my uncle and his wife plus their 3 grown up kids plus my mother and I. Lucky our dining table sits eight.

Is being psychic a genetic trait? I swear my grandmother always knows what to say to me like she can read my mind. As we all know, I like to sit in silent contemplation in various corners of the house. My favourite is always the front porch/entrance/balcony. The house is built high set off the ground like the kind you find in Queensland, so when it rains it doesn’t flood. At my grandmother’s birthday party I had at least three or four neighbours and family approach me to say “we heard you were in town but your mother has not come to visit. So and so told me cause they see you on the balcony every morning drinking coffee”. So weird. I’m only affronted by it because I came here to hide out so it’s funny to be noticed in that regard. It feels like real life monitoring snap map. My bitmoji and I are are bffs btw. You should get one. Next week I will have to begin the rounds of visitation. It’s so tiring. These are the people who ask you if you’re married or where you’re working and the one thing I don’t feel like doing is explaining myself to anyone. I wish they would just ask me if I’m hungry and leave me alone.

Back to my grandmother’s astute psychic abilities. So I’m sitting there as usual, thinking in English cause the thought experiment is hard. And she walks up to me and says “sometimes what we want is not what we need and that’s why we don’t get it”… “the lord knows what we need. The rest is testing”. Filter filter filter out the religious connotations. I think this one was about learning to let go. I am not one to let go. I think it’s the perfectionism and stubbornness. What a poor combo. Or maybe she was trying to be encouraging because it really does feel like everything I want is always being thwarted. What is this concept of things not being meant for you? Is it fate? I’m always chasing what I want. But I guess it’s cause I have no idea what I need. It is like how before I left to come here I almost threw away all my worldly possessions. There was a deep fucking clean. I approached it with the mentality that if I were to start a new life what do I need? The answer was myself. I’m looking at the shambles of my life. I have nothing definitive in the traditional sense, no job, no husband (I don’t think this is definitive but other people seem to) and no idea of what I want. Maybe I was looking at it all wrong cause it’s really hard to stomach not getting what you want. But it’s really easy to be grateful if you have what you need. Kudos to her. She is next level emotional healing inception.

Banana update: Yesterday there were 3 bunches sitting up on the balcony ledge. I thought it was to ripen. Nope. My grandmother puts them up there to signal to the neighbours to come up and take them. Cool. We got bananas. You don’t. Here you go.

xx SJ

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