Grey

I know a writer with grey hair. 

With brown eyes that see the world as is yet never once wept. With pink scars that cover soft skin but never callous flesh, flesh that has touched but never felt. His heart has never loved, or at least refuses to admit such fall. His hands are wounded and weathered; his words are wise with restraint. A writer so convicting, so stern. Stone cold, even in the crash. That writer with grey hair made a writer of me.

When I was little, I wanted to be a butterfly. I was never willing to stay put. Not until I had a blue house on a hill overlooking the Mediterranean. My balcony would be filled with sunflowers and I'd stare for hours at how the ocean refuses to stop kissing the shoreline, regardless of how many times it gets pushed away. I'd have long locks--mermaid hair. But mind you, that was when I was little.

Sometimes now I wish I had the financial freedom to leave home for a while. Not to find somewhere more deserving of the title, but so I can defend it against a foreign place. I'd throw off all baggage and have tapas and wine with strangers, wear long linen dresses, dance skin to skin, and sink toes into sand.

But when reality strikes, I get reminded of how I don't have the financial freedom, how I'll never flutter away like butterflies. I was quite the daydreamer and in due time, delved my dreams into my writing. Syncing body, mind, soul with the scribbles on a paper, allowing the ink to cross my tears and dot my eyes.

Growing up, everyone said I had hands like my papa's. It made me upset. Just hands? My sister had his eyes, his nose, his smile, and I was left with the long, crooked and broken fingers, familiar to the habit of knuckle cracking. But a blessing in disguise, I learned to use my hands to write. To articulate so eloquently I could easily slap someone from here until next Thursday with words. And if not, then mend hearts or bandage bruises with them. Just like how my father mended all of his the exact same way.

From being diagnosed with cancer to losing what was supposedly his "other half," when his world was bounded and barricaded by abundant pain, his words allowed his mind to flutter. And so, when life slipped chaos and distress into my coffee cup, punched humiliation into my stomach, and handed me flyers of cynicism and defeat, I think of my father, the man with the grey hair, and how he let his words take flight.