There is always great drama in things being unspoken and hidden specially when one has an urge to tell them. There are times when you think someone is dreamy because of their oblique behavior, but the fact might be that they never chose to be dreamy. Perhaps, dreaminess was thrust upon them because they didn’t get noticed. What you’re hearing from dreamy people isn’t necessarily what they’re imagining you’re hearing.

In the household I grew up in, my brother was the smart kid and my sister was the beautiful kid. The only vacancy for me was the troubled asshole kid. So I embraced the role and I became pretty good at it. So much so that, my mom once said “If I didn’t have you, I wouldn’t know how it feels like to have a son”.

Close to the end of winter, I went back home to visit my parents. On the second day of the visit, I took the entire day off to lay down on my bed. While staring up to the ceiling, I found myself fighting confusion, because I had no idea where or how to begin the process of reconciling what was going on in my memories -and the reality of my present life. I went out for lunch, surely, and at night, but otherwise remained flat on my back on the bed.

I had assembled enough thoughts to fill a silo, and now I had no idea what to do with it. I thought to write them down and ultimately I couldn’t write even one sentence. I was blocked by a shrill dichotomy. I was stymied by unsophistication. I had never tried to put so many different components, characters, description, dialogue, narrative, set pieces, humor, history, drama, and so forth into a single bundle. So I slept on it until I got back.

After a long period of evaluation I concluded: a complicated story is just another story. This one is personal. It’s one man’s experience trying to reconcile the past and present. The passage between east and west. The tale of transitioning from respect to fairness. It has become my challenge to appreciate, and hopefully, relay something of it. I like stories when they’re just there for cheap laughs, but occasionally experiences like this make me reflect and feel there’s something to twig.

I might have been the asshole kid during those remote years. But in the end, I think I’m only a combination of all three kids.