The house at Begonia Terrace had finally been sold, and we'd been making the final excavations before handing over the house in a few days' time.
I had to go back one more time.
I opened all the doors upstairs, and I walked through all the rooms, and I let the afternoon light into the dim hallway. I entered the master bathroom and was reminded how much I miss having a bathtub, and thought about the amount of fun I had wasting time and splashing water in that bathtub as a kid.
I paused at my old bedroom, noting the places where furniture had been, and where it still was. I saw that my postcards and pictures had been removed from the dressing mirror. I opened my old closets and saw that the only thing left in it was a tiny picture of Tom Cruise in the movie The Firm that I had pasted behind the closet door when I was 14. I pushed aside the curtain and looked out my bedroom window, the same one that once let moonlight through to fall on my face as I lay in bed looking up.
I didn't realise I'd forgotten to look at the mirror behind my bedroom door till now.
I entered the kitchen, the only room in the house with a hideous colour scheme (because it was the one room my dad had been allowed to decorate). I realised what a great kitchen it was and still is. In spite of the glaring banana yellow cabinets and mucky green tiled floor, it was cheerful and very comfortably oriented. I suddenly loved that I had tried to play hopscotch on that tiled floor, that the oven never worked, that the fridge surface was stained from all the magnets that had clung to it. I loved that it had another door that led to the backyard. I'd never noticed how spacious the backyard was because it was usually half covered with clothes hanging out to dry on bamboo poles.
I closed the doors, recognising all the unique sounds each door makes, missing the metallic twitching sounds those old doorknobs make when I twist them.
I walked down the stairs, remembering how, as a kid, I'd try to climb down the stairs on just the banisters without getting caught by my mum, and how I'd sometimes take my toys and play under the stairs. I saw the odd spot on the wall where they'd decided to paint the wall around the piano rather than move it.
I'd also forgotten to look at the beige marble floor downstairs, where little me used to love to scan it and fancy I saw shapes of objects and people in the marble swirls, the way some people like to identify shapes in clouds. Those marble swirls were my clouds.
I walked through the garden, where the big ixora shrubs and some trees were still flourishing, even though our other garden residents had faded. I looked at the empty spot where the old mango tree had been cut down years ago because it stopped fruiting, and the other empty spot where the guava tree had also been chopped when it became diseased; its guavas sometimes grew bigger than my head. I looked at our beautiful rambutan tree - my dad remarked that this year's harvest would have been great as he'd been fertilising it well the past months; I drew some little comfort in that the new owner had said he wants to keep the tree.
I passed the two rusting bicycles - I'd learnt how to cycle on the blue one with the basket, and I'd spent my teenhood zooming through Seletar Hills and pedalling to piano lessons on the large black mountain bike. I'd spent so much time roaming the estate on that bike, learning every lane, conquering (almost) every slope and discovering the sweaty, achy way why the Hills were named so.
I looked over the last of the stuff we were not going to take with us, and fought to resist taking many of them with me. Obvious as it was, I regretted that we couldn't take the huge grandfather's clock with us, even though it'd stopped working 15 years ago. Instead, I grabbed some books that I'd forgotten and walked out the front door onto the porch.
On my way out of the driveway, I paused at the front gate, briefly pondering the countless memories and life landmarks that took place at that exact spot. How can one tiny geographical spot contain so much of a person's life, hold so much value?
The gate was shut and locked, and I turned away, feeling the tears come up again and pushing them down. As I pulled away down a street that is beyond familiar, I turned back for a last incomplete glance, and said my silent goodbye to my real home.
I love that old house the way a dog owner loves his mangy old mongrel. It's hard to let go, knowing no one who comes after will love it the way I do. It's old, has cracks in the paint, pieces of parquet flooring that insists on coming loose, probably still a leak somewhere, old fashioned interior, lopsided roof on one side (thanks to my neighbour). And knowing that the new owner will not love it for what it is and will probably modify it drastically, if not tear it down completely and rebuild, breaks my heart.
After we'd moved out 6 years ago, I still had dreams, both good and bad, about that house, in the various rooms, in the garden, on the streets hugging the house. No one can live and grow up in one place for 23 years and not have it echo and haunt and insist on its place in your consciousness. I sometimes still dream about that house.
Like losing a loved one, goodbye is never enough.
