rivulets of blood

 Last year, I had an accident （＞人＜；）

It was the 29th of November, 2024. When I awoke to the sound of pitter-patting and that familiar scent of wetness, that cold hanging in the air again, I felt delighted, for I loved the rain. Then it dawned on me that this pleasant torrential rain ruined my plan of cycling. 

That had been our plan. Now it was in ruins. I felt horrible, tossed and turned in my bed, stared at the white, bumpy wall next to my mother, though I couldn't see her body. Was she here? She should be gone soon; my father wouldn't like to see her. They had signed the divorce papers last year, so the sentiment was still fresh in their hearts. Seeing each other was too much. After all the arguments about personal time, priorities, bringing up my brother and I, they were willing to let everything go. Except us. I appreciate that they struggle with face-to-face encounters which spark hateful, tense, gut-flipping memories, all to raise us well. To not abandon us. To love us. It's immensely heartbreaking, even more so when this fable of self-sacrifice has me at the center. 

I couldn't just sit there and brood anymore, so I got up and texted my father, asking if we would follow through with the plan. When he arrived later on, but still abruptly and suddenly as always, he gave me a sarcastic chuckle.

"Look at this weather," he gestured, huge eyes conveying the humour his words sometimes couldn't, for those words floating out of his mouth had turned to daggers before, piercing into my mother and making her double over, cry and bleed and screech, as my brother and I sat in the bedroom and heard. "Do you think we can cycle?" He let the rhetoric travel on a puffed-out exhale, and then his eyes caught my mother's.

Nevertheless, I was undaunted. After our lunch of shabu-shabu, I asked again, "Can we cycle?" My excuse was that the rain was letting up. Staring at me, my father spared a quick glance at the sky, then smiled a little, "We'll see." My brother continued picking at his plate.

I should never have asked to cycle, for what my father had in mind caused me to rip and tear skin, tissues and nerves. I was too focused on the shuttlecock to see that moderately sized puddle of water in my path, but I skidded and hit the floor hard. The impact jolted me, but I shook it off quickly, brushing it off, planning to continue the game, when my father made a sound. Blood. There was so much blood, twin, now triplets of roads forking down my leg. It reminded me of when I stabbed my thumb with a carving knife. The blood dripped all the way to the toilet, and it took about 3 minutes to stop the bleeding. Back then, the pain was deep-seated, pulsing and throbbing. Now? Shallow indentations, akin to lacerations. I don't know which was better.

The incident loosened my brother's tongue, as he went on and on about his experiences of falling and bleeding and being pained while I held the tissue to my knee, trying not to get my socks wet in the puddle on the floor, so similar to the one that did my undoing. My father hated this newfound speech from my brother, and he hurled insults at him mercilessly whilst tending to me, including "idiot boy" and "useless". I stared at the tissue on my knee.

Then my father slipped, skidded over the puddles of water on that somewhat rough concrete floor, like Messi Ronaldo, as my brother commented. I supposedly said "Today is the day of falling!", when all I remember was laughing at him, sort of in a daze. As if I couldn't really believe that he had just fallen. Nearby, a woman, presumably a mother of a few children, screamed "Oh god" in a concerned way, but didn't do anything to help. My father, smiled and maybe laughed or fumed childishly, before picking himself back up and pushing his bicycle to the nearest public toilet to wash up. He had exhausted our supply of water, kept in a H2O bottle, to clean up my wounds.

When we reached the toilets, my brother pointed out, as he always had been at the time, that there was a perfectly fine badminton court here. "Man, why didn't we use this court?" He moaned, and my father had his back turned to his, so I feared the worst. Luckily, he only replied with something witty that I can't recall, then stepped into the bathroom to use the spray.

I remember thinking about my violent fantasies on the way home. I had been thinking of them a lot lately; they were haunting me as much as I was conjuring them up. But now I could feel the consequences of getting into a fight, the disability that arises from injuries which I had just brushed away like negligible details. How the media I consume described pain and wounds, I had just ignored. Pushed it into my overflowing bucket of shit I can't comprehend. Language was never my strong suit, but now I think that it may be working. I'm starting to write more, and read more, in English and Chinese. But somehow it still feels like a waste of my time, like reading about electrolysis or alkenes would be a better investment. And I succumbed to those thoughts, but then I rerouted, and then I felt giddy and dizzy and sleepy all at once; needless to say, I felt bad. And now I'm here, talking and pouring out my heart, leaving it all out to dry again. Yes, it's me, here with the endless commas and the never-ending "ands", "buts" and "howevers". Always trying to find a way to put my foot in the door. To hold your attention. To make snappy new sentences and revelations that nobody will read.

And for what? I don't know.