My parents are coming to visit tomorrow, arriving on Monday, and I must confess (with some shame) that I feel little joy at the prospect. More people in the house means more work for me, less space to breathe, and scarcely a moment of solitude. The only consolation I can muster is that they may share in the tiresome duty of watching my niece, who, delightful as she can be, is an unceasing whirlwind of piercing screams and energy. She will turn two next Saturday, and my parents intend to stay for a full week. A week! And in my very own room, no less!
I know it is wretched of me to feel so put upon. A dutiful daughter ought to welcome such visits with open arms, but I have never been particularly dutiful, nor have I ever had a fondness for company forced upon me. It seems a cruel thing to think, but when I say I dislike visitors—my parents are no exception.
Update: They just called from the family group chat on Messenger and informed us that they want to take a fast craft, so they might arrive tomorrow. I only listened with silent displeasure as my mind was already calculating the little time I had left to clean my room. The sweet thought that I still had a day to idle is now, unfortunately, dipped in a bitter sauce, rendering it no longer possible to relish.
My room has no air conditioner—fuck! I think I just burned my throat..
Sorry for the interruption, but goddamn .. My niece and I are eating the rice soup I just cooked, and I fed myself a spoonful, thinking it was no longer scalding after blowing on it a couple of times, but boy, was I wrong. Before I could spit it out, my stupid reflex instead decided to swallow it all in one gulp!
Anyway, as I was saying, my room has no air conditioner, and my sister has been planning to install one before our folks arrive because she wants them to be comfortable. Oh, absolutely. A year of me using that room, and she never once bothered with my discomfort on the hot, scorching days. The installation might take place tomorrow, which means another disturbance for me.
Ah, I might have to sleep on the couch for a week .. Oftentimes, I sleep late at night, and I can't have my parents witnessing me watching series or scrolling through my phone till 3 AM or sunrise if we are to share the same room because then they would bring it up the next day, upon which my sister would hear, and the fact that I purposely don't sleep on the days I am horribly languid would be discovered, which I had seldom blamed on the poor excuse: "I couldn't sleep."
My brother-in-law will be traveling that week as well, which means Father will take his place in the kitchen—conveniently enough, according to my sister. Of course it is convenient for her, she is not the one who will be washing the dishes. Whenever my brother-in-law cooks, there are always more and always larger extra utensils to be cleaned, and it will be the same thing with Father. Oh, I complain, but if my brother-in-law doesn’t cook, then I’d have to cook, which means more work for me, so despite my grievances about my responsibility, it is a blessing that he is the formal chef in the house. Besides, I find no pleasure in cooking. Don't get me wrong—I know how to. I used to think I didn’t, but with a list of ingredients and instructions, it is surprisingly easy enough, granted that such ingredients are available in the kitchen. Now, cooking might be easy for me, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it tastes good. (Although my rice soup at present would disagree).
It’s funny how it's the men in the family who possess a passion for the culinary arts. I remember when my older sister and I were younger, we tried cooking spaghetti for the first time, and we didn’t know what tablespoon meant. (English is not our first language). I thought it must be an incredibly large spoon because a table is large. So, out of impulse, I told my sister: "Just pour it all." And the witch poured the rest of the salt from its goddamn container into the pot. It was the nastiest and saltiest spaghetti we had ever tasted in our lives—we had to let it go. I love spaghetti and to have that atrocity in my mouth was a brutal assault.
Perhaps if Father weren’t so easily ill-humoured when he cooked and needed our assistance, then cooking might have been fun for us. Or we might have found delight even in the prospect of experimenting in the kitchen. But no. The entire time, we dreaded the process of his cooking, knowing that one tiny mistake from us would set him off, exploding in cruel words. So cooking for us was never a good experience. Our father’s behavior in the kitchen—his ill temper, criticism, and the anxiety it caused—conditioned us to associate cooking with stress, fear of mistakes, and emotional discomfort rather than creativity or enjoyment, which I think had altogether resulted to us repulsing it. This culinary resentment is, in fact, one of the main reasons my sister decided to work from home again, and thus needed me around the house—so she'd have more load enough to avoid having to cook. The fact that she avoids cooking is proof that my aversion towards it wasn't just a personal reaction but a shared experience, reinforcing the idea that cooking = stress. The only cooking my sister does is the ones for her baby, a little monster who would devour anything even if it's poop.
On a brighter note, Mom said she’s bringing some dresses for me, which is nice. When I moved here almost a year ago, I only brought a handful of clothes to wear, so I had to don the same thing twice in a week, which is a stark contrast to my closet in the city, where I could go a month without doing laundry and never wear the same outfit twice.
When I asked my sister if she had any clothes to spare (I had no clean clothes left at the time), she eagerly said she had some she'd been wanting to dispose of, and then proceeded to laugh like a dying hyena upon handing me her maternal dresses, which are humongous for my tiny frame. I didn’t mind; they are comfortable.
It was only last year that I bought dresses for the first time in my life (and four pairs of pyjamas)—pretty dresses I could use when going out. If you're wondering why only for the first time, it’s because our family business has been in the clothing industry for as long as I can remember, and I never once felt the necessity to buy from another store until last year.
Sigh. The plan was to be here for "more or less" three months, and that turned out to be the more of that. My sister stopped being generally snappy and nagging me about my plans in life the moment I started working for her as a nursemaid, which was a pleasant change from how bitchy she had been when my little sister and I came to visit last year for the first time. I suppose it’s because this house can no longer function as it is without me. However, once in a blue moon, when the mood strikes, she still pops the godforsaken dreary question.
Always when we dine.
Always with searching eyes.
"What are your plans in life? Do you worry about your future at all?"
How do I even tell her that the only future I worry about is the future of my ghost? I want my ghost to look pretty, so I must die young.