🏆Featured on TeenFiction | Head Over Heels
To Leroy 'Lee' Hiew, home's never felt like home. He has a huge mansion, a big car, and more money than he could ever spend. And yet, the idea of home always seems to elude him.
Armed with his dog, Socks...
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He wears his dress to the cemetery.
The wind whips through the roses in his arms, casting a few stray petals into the breeze. Among the slate-grey headstones, rough and chalky and chipped at the tips, Lee is a blot of stark white, cream fabric drifting around his slim frame like droves of fresh snow. Ironic, he thinks bitterly, since he's got a heart as black as coal. And even though he tries not to fuel the fire, he still does---lost in the flames like a wandering spirit never laid to rest.
He glances down at himself. Mom would be proud of me. Finally living my truth and everything, he thinks, smoothing his skirt out lightly. Then he thinks about the way the skin doesn't seem to fit his wrists anymore and about how his bones poke out of his ribs like thorns and about how he's lost at least ten pounds in two weeks and instantly retracts the thought. Mom would hate this. Mom would hate seeing me suffer.
But why did she make me suffer so much, then?
Despite how much he tries to shift the blame, Lee knows his mother isn't entirely at fault. It's always been a part of her---this drifting wanderlust, the urge to flee from all her problems, the way her windflower tendencies run wild in his own blood. It's just her, and suffering is always what one makes it. He knows that. And he knows that it isn't a dead woman's fault---it can't be. That it's always been his own.
He blinks rapidly, trying to keep his tears at bay. Somehow, here, it feels a little more real---less like Mom is dead and more like Mom. Is. Dead. As if being at her last resting place gives her death a little more finality and makes the four hundred and seventeen days that she hasn't called a little more real.
No one's immortal.
Still, to him, she had been immortal. And even now, he half-expects her to rise from her grave and ruffle his hair the way she'd always done before she left, cooing, Don't worry, darling boy. I'm here.
(Then again, she's never really gone away.)
The graves have more secrets than Lee likes, so he journeys on ahead, even though he knows seeing his mother's grave will shatter him. But he supposes he's been broken already, time and time again, all the little pieces of himself torn into shreds and scattered across the universe. So he continues walking. It's all he can do.
Just like that, it's in front of him.
In Loving Memory of Cheryl Hiew, née Leong. Beloved Mother, Sister, and Friend.
It's the quote that catches his attention.
Where there is love, there is life.
Lee bites back a sob.
I miss you, Mom. And I love you so much. Would that make you come back to life?
"Hi, Mom," he says, lowering his knees to the ground as he gently places the roses in front of the chipped headstone. The scarlet bouquet is bright, as bright as his mother had been when she was alive, and something in Lee shatters just a little more. "Sorry I couldn't get them in your favourite colour. I tried, but the florist didn't know what the heck I was trying to describe. So I just went for something bold, because you would have liked that." A small sob escapes his lips. "Wouldn't you?"
