It’s moments ago I ventured in the vast skies of Brown Baby. In the first few pages I read, there’s a whiff of the narrator scratching the wound of losing his mother yet holding onto his newborn baby girl as an ointment for his itching grief. But, grief, does it arrive when we’ve ointments and pain killers in store? Or does it scratch our skins when we feel we’re no longer grieving? Does it arrive when we’re patiently waiting for it to visit us? Or does it arrive when we start believing it’s already forgotten us? Ah, grief, as I sense it, is a wound we try to heal, making sure we’re using the right medicine, taking the right precautions, touching it tenderly. And, when we forget about it, touching it hastily to assure ourselves it’s gone, it aches. Itches. And, makes its presence felt. And heard. And seen. Who knows the ways of the grief? We sense it. Clinging to our bodies, to the sense of belonging. Like humans, this grief yearns to find its way, clinging to identity, scratching it, holding it and sensing belonging and abandonment. Perhaps.

Perhaps it’s a trickster as the author says.

“Grief is a trickster. It lacks consistency or reason. It sets traps in the banal and mundane. It never arrives at the significant moments you expect it to… It will give you the time you need to move forward before creeping up slowly behind you to remind you it’s always there… Grief freezes everything.”

I know, I only read a few pages but I sense this book is going to take me places, within me and beyond me. The ones no marker can mark, the ones no storm can wipe out. 懶