Scattered Skies
This is my HSC creative and it’s special to me because it marks the early stages of my serious writing journey. I wrote it on my uncles balcony where they had the nicest views of the sky – and for one of the first times I was able to piece together random ideas, snippets of my own experiences, my context and things that I felt, into one holistic story.
Tossing her newly gifted leather shoes to a corner and slumping herself into the closest chair on the balcony of her uncle’s apartment — Asiya flung her arms and wrapped them around her head as she groaned loudly. Her dark brows were painted in a frown against the almond complexion of her distinctly sharp-featured face that relentlessly marked her a foreigner. It felt as if she trudged home from school every single day wishing she had done things different. She knew if Abbu were here — he would not be impressed at her way of handling adversities as he would smile at her with his stubborn yet kind eyes and call her an over-emotional fool. Asiya’s fathers’ words “It was only a matter of time before his work would demand less of him and they would be together again ‘’ reverberated in her mind as she so deeply wished for his promises to hold true. From the edge of the balcony, as her eyes looked downwards, scanning the strange cityscape, Asiya felt a pang of longing for it to be the streets of Bangladesh she grew up in. For the skyrises and polished cars to instead be a place rich with family, familiarity and, her father. In a subconscious act of angst, Asiya began to leer with deep contempt at the ugly, shiny rectangle she received as her consolation prize. She had always dreamed of owning a phone back at home and now she had traded her father’s presence for a block of glass.
Releasing a heavily conflicted sigh, Asiya looked up instead, to plead to her special friend — her only constant companion regardless of where she stood on the earth — the sky, to offer her comfort. The seemingly endless beauty of the sky not once held Asiya back from losing herself. It was a glorious vault of scattered lights she decided — with its familiar blue azure or its darker grey storms. With its soft sunset yellows or its dusty summer reds. It was faultless and incapable in its ability to bore whether it settled for an empty cloudless cerulean or for brilliant flashes of pure white tinted against a deep navy blue.
As she quietly watched the bold orange hues of the sky slowly transform itself into a sad and pale pink, she concluded it as the only type of change she didn’t mind. As Asiya wondered if her father too was gazing up into the same sky, she noticed the silhouette of a flock of birds painted against the horizon, soaring in a perfect union unto a clear direction. Where were they heading to with such certainty? Did they too leave their young behind? She blinked for a moment and they were long gone, yet a strange sense of hope overtook her — despite being separated, they were still united.
Gradually, time lost its charm as it morphed into one long blur and suddenly Asiya noticed that darkness had creeped up on her. Instead of caressing her face, the cool night wind painfully pricked at it, serving as a bittersweet reminder of Asiya’s blissful childhood. It mercilessly evoked within her a flood of nostalgia, transporting her back to the nights, where she, Abbu and all her cousins would gaze into the moonlight as they laughed, fought and cried in the open fields of their village. Wide-eyed they would marvel at the sky’s majesty, at its undiscovered beauty. In her country they would always respond to the glimmering symbols of hope. But as Asiya looked down onto the skyline of the minuscule posh city, she noticed how the bobbing heads were too bedazzled by their own flashing lights to even look up for a moment. Made blind by the city’s luminescence and the dimming of their phones, deaf by the shrills of cars passing by and disillusioned so deeply by their own selves to even ponder for a moment at the magnificent world around them.
Clenching her shiny new gadget, her sweat hugging the glass, Asiya felt a sudden and compelling desire of disassociation from it. But her mind began crawling with thoughts — abandoning it meant she would lose her means of communication with him, yet keeping it would simultaneously, and almost inconceivably serve as a constant, daunting confirmation of his absence? Quickly replacing her rational thinking, Asiya fantasied about the profound ease of releasing her tight grip — the sweetness of watching it fall — the momentous satisfaction of hearing the sounds of shattered glass against concrete
Suddenly, the intrusion of sound from her uncle’s call for dinner broke Asiya’s trance as reality hit her once again. And in that very moment she felt a complete sense of control over her emotions. For the first time in a long time — she decided for herself. She would no longer translate the pain of separation into one of her father’s doing. With hope and a slight hint of fear in her tone, she replied “Coming Chacha”, as she strode inside to the welcoming aroma of spices with a physical aura of renewed certainty.
