The Jar – Cassandra Wan

At the furthest corner of the kitchen counters,
a glass jar the size of my palm
has grown a wispy beard around its cap,
is cloaked in suffocating gray dust,
preparing for a winter
that never came.

Many younger, polished bottles stand tall
in front of this jar.
They reveal their elegantly sloped shoulders
and glossy labels in digital print,
alluring the sun with their charm so much that

this glass jar is never the first,
the second or even the last to see the sun,
because it has never been summoned
to the sun’s majestic presence.
And whoever does not see the face of the sun,
is cast out of the presence of time,
for the sun is to time,
as the hands are to a clock.

Yet, at the corner of my memory
where I carefully comb through and store
each and every childhood experience
so dear to me,
in their own time and place,
I might have seen this peculiar glass jar somewhere.
Somewhere, but I can’t remember where I have placed it.

I lick my thumb and press it hard on the jar–
as hard as I was trying to recall
where I have last seen this jar
stripped of its disguise of dust and grime.

The first beams of light
gush into this window of thumbprint
and out of the layers
upon layers of thick woollen dust.
I peer inside:
someone’s greasy fingerprints
are delicately wrapped by the lacework of dust.
The prints and their shapes fit the ones that I store
at the top-most shelves of my childhood memory.
Slowly, her face, her favourite powder-pink shirt
and oversized green shorts of that day appeared.
The shirt and shorts that are now locked away,
in a closet full of pungent moth-balls,
never to be opened again.

It was when grandma was busy adding more soy sauce
to her smoking and sizzling wok of fried egg
when I, the height of her tummy,
tugged at her shirt and looked up to her, whining
“I’m hungry!”

This is the cry of the old, empty jar too.
A once important jar—the pride of the kitchen,
pining away day after night
night after day for its mistress,
without hope of recollection,
except when someone takes pity on it
and struggles to recall who once held it,
whose fingerprints those are.
And those who manage to recall,
are the ones
whose lives that grandma have left
her fingerprints in the depths of their hearts.