In Continuum.

There is a picture of me when I was about two years old, with a pinch of hair tied up into a rocket like Alfalfa from The Little Rascals in the old dusty photo albums. Next to the miniature version of myself is a woman who used to work at my father's office. She was an employee there, only a few years of age over twenty, and grew to become good friends with the family. That was twenty years ago, when my mother was only a few years older than her, and when I was still a baby with a rocket on my head. It has been twenty odd years, and I was told a month ago that she has finally given birth to her own little boy - at forty one years old. It has been a pregnancy that a lot of her friends, including my parents, have been waiting for. She has been married for the longest time, but luck hasn't been on their side for the most part. This time, however, everything worked out well for them, and they've only just celebrated the baby's first month on this, well, let's call it a planet to remain neutral. I suggested to my aunt to pay a visit to the baby today, which was what happened as we made our way down from TaoYuan all the way to Taipei this afternoon. 

It was a neighborhood that certainly took a lot of directions from strangers and literally a lot of twists and turns. The hand-written directions from my aunt looked like a treasure map written in ancient Mayan, and nothing made a lot of sense to me. When it did finally make sense, they were instructions that included anything from "drive up the bridge" to "drive down the bridge", instructions that were redundant and could have been left out completely. Anyway, we managed to find our way into the serene neighborhood, a rather old one that has been a relic of my parents' days in Taiwan. We found a parking space next to the remnants of a tree, and the summer sun pricked the back of my neck like little needles. There was a small nursery around the corner from where we parked, and the teacher was telling the students to imagine a great big mountain with snow on one side, and they had to picture themselves skiing down at high speed. Little children, they are always so pleasant to listen to, just as long as they are not crying or when they are watching the same movie as yourself when they really shouldn't have been. Four floors above our heads, she called down to us and then announced to the entire neighborhood just how much my father and I resembles each other - the third person on this trip back home already. Great. 

The apartment didn't have lifts at all, and the only way up to their home was to climb the stairs all the way up to the top. It was a grueling climb especially for my aunt, not to mention the fact that the shadows in the corners could have very well provided a good hiding place for a perverted old man, a desperate drug addict, or worse. But it was all good once we reached the top, when the front door opened and there she was, more than ten years after we've last met, looking less like the woman I remembered but more like a mother. It was a typical apartment in a typical old neighborhood, with just two bedrooms and a living room, not to mention the kitchen at the back. I was cautious about taking my socks off, as if any sudden movement would disturb the baby that was asleep on his father's laps. The father looked up at me and smiled, and I was reminded of a high school classmate in Singapore somehow. The sudden gush of air-conditioning struck my face with quite a force, and I was told that it was turned on for the sake of the baby, since they didn't want him to "overheat", the mother said, as if she was talking about a piece if pizza or something. 

There it was, thirty-one days old, wrapped in a small blue blanket with dolphins sewed on one side. The little bundle of joy, the result of so many expectations from so many different people out there, materialized into this miniature of a human being. His skin was peeling and had mild rashes here and there, and I was told that it was normal for a child that old (or young) to have such symptoms. You know how it is, new to this awful world of ours with little to no immune system, everything then becomes an allergy somehow. Apparently it was the wet tissues that they used which causes the rashes, and my aunt gave the young couple a good lecture before taking over the hugging. I was a little wary of my aunt and the way she carried the child, though she was also half the reason why I am the person that I am today (she doesn't have any children, which was why she took care of me while my mother was busy in the past). But you see, the word "clumsy" would be an under-statement to describe my aunt, because she tends to inflict accidental injuries on herself all the time, or cause inanimate objects around her to destroy due to her carelessness. She was also the same person who slammed the car door on my fingers and broke them all, an incident which I am very happy to not remember. So there she was, holding a delicate baby in her arms and swaying it back and forth while humming a small tune. Yeah, I was nervous as hell. 

But the baby turned out fine, just an obscene amount of peeling around the body and a general look of irritation on his face when he was woken up by the father's strange and comical laughter. Everything about the baby fascinated me, and vice versa for him too. He looked at me with complete wonderment, like everything else that he might have come in contact with for the past month. You know, the basin of water, the touch of his mother's hands, the lights, the blankets, and then - me. I was a human equivalent of all of the above, and yet I didn't mind at all. I wonder how much of the first month he is going to remember in a few years, perhaps none at all. But if he does, the way that I do, perhaps he'd remember a curious human being staring at his knuckles for some reason, just vague images of the past like I remember about mine. To be honest, I haven't the faintest clue in regards to the first month, but apparently my family moved from Taipei to where I grew up for the next five years immediately after my birth. I remember only bits and pieces of my childhood in Taiwan, a few scents and a few flashing imageries. Which is why, there was a lot of catching up that day when the mother told me about how I was the first and the last baby she ever carried before her own son came along. 

I'm sure some of the readers here remember the canary that the family had, the same canary that I killed with my bare hands (once again, I don't remember myself doing it but, apparently everybody blames me). The employees were trying to teach me animal names last time, and everybody pointed the canary out to me and said "bird", hoping that I'd learn and remember. As a bright young child in contrary to who I am right now, I learned the names of various animals really quick, until one day our young mother, let's call her L, came along and tried to confuse me. Apparently, according to L, she pulled me to the cage one day and told me that that was a "chicken", and I stared back at her in confusion. I didn't learn how to speak until I was about two and a half years old, or three. If I knew, I would have started some kind of argument with her or something about whether or not it was a bird or a chicken. Well, I guess everybody was trying to lie to that version of me - it's a canary people, be specific! So that was me as a child, the same one that (supposedly) almost ate my own poop, thinking that it was food. It was strange, and amazing, how I was the last baby that L carried in her arms when I was a month old. I was practice for her, in a way, and I guess this is the only context where I can say that I was proud to be one. 

I'm not sure about the others, but I personally feel strange when a group of people come together to tell me about what happened to me in the past, things that I hardly remember myself. It is as if I suffered from some horrific accident in the past that caused me to lose some memories, or something. It's kind of like how Ahmad forgot how to swim, when he actually could while being in primary school, it's the same thing. There was my aunt and L, telling me about how I was like when I was a baby, things that are difficult for me to even picture properly in my head. It's like this giant puzzle of you, and other people are piecing it together because you can't remember how the picture was like before you took them apart. So, it was still interesting to meet with them, even more fascinating to see the baby close up. Babies have always had this invisible zone of protection around them somehow, people are usually more protective around babies, especially with strangers. You see them on trains and buses all the time, and all you can do is to smile and maybe play with their fingers a little bit. But you can never get close enough to examine their every move, anyway. It's not polite, and just downright creepy if you go overboard. It's kind of like being a zookeeper in a safari as oppose to being a visitor to a zoo - it's just different when you are closer.