Cally Lim

Storytelling

I want to believe that I had a mostly fortunate childhood,

As my parents tried their hardest to bring me

Around the world. Yet I have friends who have more tender

Nostalgia to the old days, of times their parents would read

Stories to them before sleeping. I smile amazed, yet envious, as for me

A volcano sleeps buried in the underground of my mind,

Where time slowly excavates it for more truths to find.

Here is this book, stuffed tight in the furthest corner

Of shelved memories, musty with thick dust to cover

The scars of the assigned book in elementary school.

I was eight when I first learnt about Pompeii

And the people screaming through the vivid pictures

And skeletal detail, as the tsunami of lava swallowed

The whole town with corpses the colour of smoke

Found in the last pages of the book. It was the way

That corpse stared at me through the abyss-deep sockets

Of the skull, that made me avoid the book, terrified

That this lava tongue will swallow me as well. Look,

I had long forgotten what my teachers taught from the book,

But I still remembered my parents’ fascination

Over my obsessive escapism from this cursed thing;

They joked over how there's nothing to be scared,

And I could, in my past lives, be one of those who died.

It didn't stop me from fearing to even look at it,

So my parents thought I should be exposed

Under glaring lights of my bedroom, where my mom recited

The book with a pained smile in the night. Even as each word

Stabbed a shriek into my throat, she still went on until

My skin sunk deep into my cracking skull.

In the corner of my bed I was reduced to a howling volcano

To drown out my mom's voice for good.

And since that explosion, I forced my mom to bury

The thing in the uppermost shelf away from my sight,

And then banished away to another owner. It did work,

As over time I stopped fearing to look at Italian people

And barely flinched when Pompeii was mentioned.

Like my parents, I slowly forgot about this entombed

Village, even if the aftereffects of seeing gore late

In the night would evoke haunting shivers of deja vu.

I also forgot my old customs of telling stories to myself

Before falling asleep, against my parents’ judgements

And thinking I’m talking to ghosts. Yet every time

I lock my fingers with my ghastly younger self, she

Still trembles, and we still share the same tears.

All I could do was to keep granting solace from fears

That are still not healed after unearthing her whole,

While dusting and piecing this memory back again.

Perhaps this is what storytelling truly is:

Being your first audience, the author of your fate

And deciding the pacings and plot for yourself,

Making sense of the volcanos and calamities within

And making sense of the ashen remains of paper

To reconstruct them like mosaics in a cathedral.

In there houses your childhood selves, free

With forgetfulness and self-forgiveness.

Words from the Author:

“Unfortunately it may not seem to be a typical Asian childhood related poems per se, but the poem is about a pretty traumatic thing that happened to me because my parents were not fully understanding of the sensitivity I had when I was eight on a pretty gory experience of learning about Pompeii and how my mom tried and failed to get me to overcome the fear, and how it's related to why I do storytelling as a self-healing outlet and to reclaim my power after that troubling time in childhood. I suppose in Asian families because they tend to be more strict (though my parents are not considered as strict) they may be stereotypically presented as being less sensitive to the feelings of the child, but I suppose to a certain extent, it's a common tragic thing to see in parents for any ethnicity, not just Asian parents. But I suppose even with a rough experience in childhood, I wanted to show how we too can heal in our own way, and just embrace ourselves and sometimes parent our inner child when we can I suppose.”