(Inspired by Dark and Nezu)

I'd made a promise to myself, that any non-fandom stuff I put up here, especially RL, should be funny.

I break that promise.

These are memories that are not mine, but live in me now because the one who had them doesn't need them anymore.

A Memory

The streets are dusty, paved with large stones, grey and larger than the boy himself. Sometimes he would try to stand there, thinking about little cities, with grey bricks and grey people, walking along the cracks of the paving stones. Sometimes he'd try to jump across, crack to crack, the soles of his shoes squeaking against the moss that grows grey-green between stones.

Other times he rides a bicycle, new shiny silver, sleek and straight, and he doesn't need to clean it, when he has servants running behind him, dusty black shoes on grey stone after a silver streak to make sure he doesn't fall.

One day he is pedalling, round and round, down the streets, the sun is loud and turns the roads almost white, he doesn't see the man in front of him. The man is walking across the street, back weighed with brown fibre woven baskets, and at the top glistens white, white silken tofu.

The crash pitches him against the man, and the basket falls. It falls, and the tofu spills from the string, sliced, cut, smashed into white soft-crumbs across the grey paving stones. And the man yells and yells and the roads are so white.

It's so white, when he's sick, sick and grey in the face, and his grandmother, his mother, and his grandaunt worry, worry so much at his pallor. He hears, later, that his grandmother goes to the man, and says Look what you have done, tofu is spilled and you can buy more but where can you buy me another grandson?

The boy doesn't remember much, other than white, white and the smell of incense, ginger and the light oil of chicken soup, and the man kneeling by his bedside, saying Sorry, sorry, please don't die.

~~~

The boy is a young man now, married and newly a father, his wife by his side. He is dreamy, his head in clouds and words, letters that flow and ebb around him and he tells the children stories. His brothers are younger than him, his sisters older, and they have children, wide-eyed minds with mouths that gape wide as he tells them of a stone monkey that burst out of a stone egg, large, fully formed, and names himself king of the waterfall cave, full of beautiful flowers everywhere you looked, and everywhere you stretched your hand fruit fell into your hand.

He tells of monks, the trials they undergo in the forests, deep in the plains of the country, high up in the mountains, with the temple large and sprawling, red pillars holding up green tiles. Lions guard the doors of red and gold, and inside thirty-six chambers because once you go in you can't come out.

The man's wife smiles, brittle and beautiful, holding out her daughter to the man's brother, listening to the man talk because she had married a scholar, and a storyteller. A dreamer who had no future in a world that spread out in poverty and grey.

The stories are all about magic and legends, and the man and his wife step into their own, two young people in a grey plane waiting to take them to a new land.

~~~

The country spreads out before the man and his wife, green from above, palms like fingers and light hair in the wind, a sky so blue it is reflected in the sea.

When the plane stops and opens, they walk out, without looking back, because home is ahead of them, in the sandy beaches, the rocky cliffs.

Home is a tiny apartment above another shop, with polished floor boards that creak slightly when the man walks on it, and he's a dreamer but a new country called Golden Mountain has no place for dreamers. The apartment has only one room, and it's theirs for as long as they can pay the rent.

And they pay the rent by having a shop, in the middle of a criss-cross of dusty roads, where the buses run and sit and steam the air with choking exhaust - the man couldn't breathe for the smoke, but buses bring people, and people bring empty stomachs.

He sells them cakes his wife bakes, and pencils and sweets he dips, a cent for a handful.

One day it is just two of them, and then it's three. And then it's four and then it's five, and the shop is the same, but making more money because the man keeps it open longer, from the grey of dawn to the grey-gold-red of twilight.

~~~

The man never forgets where he is from, a land of legends and words, of beautiful scenery and empty bowls. What he can spare, he goes to the bank, and fills in forms he cannot read, tries to send them to the grandmother, the mother he had to leave behind.

He hits a limit, and the bank manager tells him he cannot send anymore, and he takes his daughter, who goes to a catholic school down the road, to tell the manager, he has to send the money, he has to send the money to his mother.

His daughter grows up writing letters in childish scrawl across white school paper in words the man cannot read. It lacks the beauty of the man's words, the colour of his language, but no one in this Golden Mountain understands the sounds from the man's mouth, except his wife, and the few other people who live in the same village, but they are not in the positions of power. They are not the right colour, they don't have the right education. And the man who was a scholar begs his daughter to write pleas to banks, to companies.

~~~

One day he has enough saved in the bank to go back to the land of his birth, and his wife gives him gifts, for his brothers, his neighbours, his mother.

Gifts and money and when he sees his mother, his mother cannot see him. She touches his face, and he cries.

~~~

He sells the shop. His children have left, one to a large green country, another to a larger red arid country, and yet another to colder blue-ice, and he has worked enough, he and his wife, and they move to another country.

It's not lush. It's not green. It's dusty and spreads out in red and clay, and they buy the house they could never afford where they left, and it is theirs.

He breeds goldfish in the living room, and she grows roses and apples, and it's a long slow life without the dusty roads and buses. He is free now, to sit in a chair and watch the sun set in the window, but there're no children to tell the stories to, because they are grown up, in different parts of the world, and no matter how small it grows, their children look at him, different colours on the inside, and the sounds he make they cannot understand.

~~~

One day pain burns down his head, in his brain, and he can't walk without support, can't speak without lapses. And the words he'd always known fade away into grey.

His sons are older now, with children of their own, and don't live with him or his wife, and so now he has to leave the house that was his, and it's all grey and white, in rooms with many beds and people he doesn't know, waiting to die.

~~~

It happens again, finally, and then it's all grey. There are people he knows now, coming to see him, holding his hand, staying with him at night, but he sees his mother. His grandmother. His grandaunt. Women who loved him, knew him, and knew what kind of boy he had been, what kind of man he was.

He waits for his daughter to come, to hold his hand, one last time.

Then it's black.