桃花依旧

Flew back to Bukit Tinggi with Mom on Monday. Grandma was actually thought to be dying so we rushed back to see her for one last time. I had actually not seen her for more than a couple of years, as far as I could recall.

As uncle's car approached the still very familiar and yet strange, because of time, village a lot of childhood memories came rushing back into my mind. I still remember how exciting it was to come back to Bukit Tinggi when I was still a toddler. It was like an annual thing to go back to grandma's place. It's a hilly hence chilly place, just a few kilometers away from Genting Highland.

I remembered the paths where I had run on together with my cousins, who I had not seen for ages too. I remembered the houses that were around grandma's house. They have changed a little - reconstructed, strengthened, repainted... Somehow everything seemed, smaller than what I used to remember.

Grandma looked so weak and petite lying in her bed, losing (or gaining, as we later learned) her consciousness. My cousins, who I had remembered to be bigger and taller than I was, also didn't seem to live up to my out-of-date expectation. I had become equal, if not bigger than they were.
I was telling my Mom about this. She didn't quite get it. I myself didn't understand what I was feeling myself. The houses in the village which I had once thought to be tall and big, all seemed to have shrunk.

It's time that I accepted the inevitable. Something that I realised from another angle - that I have to accept that I am no longer the skinny young boy everyone remembered.