Prena Poetry

It is a warm autumn afternoon in this little country side town, the housewives are drying out the laundry with a child on their tired back while the men are laboring at the new cement factory that came up some months ago. The older people lavishly sit on the lawn with rosaries in their hands and talks about the upcoming constructions, the little kids run around with worn out toys in their arms, and the town with few buildings and open bamboo stalls resounds with the noise of large truck tyers and footsteps on the gravel.

I nervously board the bus for the first time, you hold my hand and tells me again that everything will be fine and we will live the life we can afford in a place far away from here. The middle-aged lady in the seat behind gives a kind smile and offers us a handful of chips, I politely accept and in exchange you offer her son a candy from your pocket. There are about twenty people in the bus about to leave this place, few would return after some months, few are running away to get hold of their destiny and few are just lost; almost like us, with no where to go to, but still has a dream to make the future together. I press a little amount of money in-between my palm, which I earned from working at a small food stall by the school. We have no cell phone or extra money to start our life, just two tickets and a bag you keep in between your legs. You exhale happily and again assure me that you have some reliable friends in the capital who would help us get a probationary job, and till then we had to work hard and look for an affordable house. I look at you, placing my whole life in your hands, reflecting that home is where I am with you, and it doesn’t matter if we are too young or too naïve, as long as we are to go through hardships together, I am ready for it; I tell you.

It is 2007, September 17, the sun amicably warms the road ahead, I look out of the bus window as the engine starts up, for the last time I think about my father, who would be lying drunk and half-asleep by the rusted table fan in a small cottage house.

I am leaving him.

I am leaving behind all those moments where I was called as a burden by my relatives since the day mother ran away from home and left us to succumb. I am leaving this little town where I have spent 18 years of my life since the day I was born in a shack; knowing that the people would wake up in the next sunrise and no one would even remember the two of us. You take my hand in yours as we ride across trees and mountains, promising never to come back to this place again; never walk in your step-father’s house and suffer the same fate twice. We land on a strange new city after hours of sickly bus ride and loud music, like you said, your friends help us get a small one room apartment and introduces us to a completely new life. After a week of surviving on one proper meal a day, you get a job at a gas station and I find myself a work at the milk booth to pay the bills. We celebrate my 20th birthday in a small crowded bar with a bunch of people we recently met, and a year later in chilly autumn morning, we welcome home our first daughter. The world would make fun of us and push us down, for we are either too young or too mindless to survive as a family of our own. But we will just laugh along with the people on a drunk Sunday evening and stand up together with hands in hands, because we know that none of them would have felt this way.