It has been one of my roughest weeks this semester. Trust me, I’ve been low before, but never this low. Especially not during this Blessed Month.
Yet here I am, completely drained, fed up and on the verge of another
scream-in-frustration-rams-head-through-wall fest. Actually, I’m
kidding. Because although I wish I had the energy and space to do that,
I’m not even allowed the luxury of venting. There’s just no time.
So that’s why I’m grateful for last night. I went to my granmama’s house.
One of the ups of having an abnormally large extended family that
stretches the boundaries of a house to its limit that its practically
bursting at the sides is that you get to disappear into the crowd of
relatives and forget about yourself for awhile. If only for just one
night, you’re not an individual, but a unit within that family with a
role to play. You get to go nuts, go wild, tease your aunts/uncles,
laugh with your closest cousins, pamper the younger cousins (Shaza is
such a sweetheart - I am positively besotted by her) and generally
become rowdy with the rowdy family.
I needed last night so badly to cheer me up.
Flashes go through my head. Terawikh prayers with all the female
cousins lining up the last saf - the “backbenchers” - while Ummi and
all the aunts take to the front. The uncles and male cousins filling in
only one saf behind Abah as the Imaam. I swear the women in my family
outnumber them on a ratio of 27:1. My aunt yelling at everyone to come
to the prayer mats quickly because Isya’ was about to start. That same
aunt loudly exclaiming “Eh nampak rambut tak?” when we had already
started praying, which causes the whole lot of the backbenchers to
guffaw and having to guiltily start over. That same aunt forcibly
dragging my reluctant sister to move to the front saf with the other
aunts, when she wouldn’t budge. That same aunt accidentally butting my
sister into the wall as she wriggles her way into her kain telekung.
If anything, last night was therapeutic. I could have laughed forever.
Once my cousins set me off, I will be as silly as silly can be till the
time comes to go back to our separate homes.
But now here I am, back to work.
And it doesn’t look like it’s going to be a very good week ahead of me.
I feel suffocated.
Ramadhan Mubaarak, brothers and sisters.
What more is there to say?
Enough said here.
Haha.
