Then and Now

Read The Reflector x  MRU Write Club in the list of writer portfolios or the print issue | 

Benjamin Urquhart, Guest Writer | 

I’m unborn, floating in an infinite ocean I cannot perceive. A fleshy thing in my mother’s stomach, back when she was whole and healthy, a decade away from tumours and radiation and bone cement. I don’t know how to think, I don’t know light, I don’t know. The doctors cut her stomach open and I’m torn through the breach into sound and color, swaddled in cloth and bestowed a name. My first memory is waddling around on the deck as my brother chases me.

My mom’s Chinese and my dad’s Canadian. I’m born in Hong Kong and remember nothing, memories swallowed into the event horizon of childhood. Youth is Dim Sum at the Silver Dragon and red envelopes of money from grandma and grandpa. I can’t speak Mandarin nor Cantonese—my tongue is harsh and unwieldy, a chainsaw that cuts through tones and soft consonants. I feel like a fraud.

I make Thor’s hammer out of styrofoam and a flashlight, monkeying around the playground until my best friend mocks me—-I learn the concept of betrayal. He pinches me on St. Patrick’s Day so I punch him in the nose: I’m weak enough that violence is always an option. I leave Nellie McClung after Grade 3 and he fades out of my life until high school because he’s my roommate’s girlfriend’s ex. He exists on the periphery of my consciousness, only invoked when my friends from EP Scarlett talk about the smartest burnout they knew: I think of summers spent biking through Palliser and the abrasion of youth.

My OCD manifests and my world becomes the length of my washroom. Prison looks like gray walls, tiled floors and water-scale on glass. My instruments of torture are the sink and shower tap. I scrub my hands until they’re red and fracturing—scalding water cascades over me until cold bleeds through. I’m still not clean. My dad sits on the other side of the door until 4AM—I escape my cell because I’m too tired to be anxious. I fall asleep wishing I wasn’t broken. My OCD gets better and better until I barely remember the pain; years of progress built on Prozac and panic attacks.

There’s a girl I really like—I don’t tell her how I feel. She goes away for a summer and comes back, but someone talked when I held my tongue. I numb the sting of cowardice with drink and lose myself in the inky sea of the night sky. My roommate jokes about the friend-zone and I consider breaking my corona bottle over his head, but I choose to do nothing, just like with her.

Physicality becomes a religion to me, just like it is for my father. I spend my 22nd summer landscaping, weightlifting, and learning martial arts. Everyday is bile in my throat and aching shoulders from holding dumbbells, tools, Thai pads. Exhaustion settles over me like a warm blanket, clouding my summer in a gentle haze. I last a month until martial arts is placed on the backburner. September rolls around and I begin to wake up.

It’s the 10th anniversary of my mothers death and my father’s house is crowded with people. Adults shoot me awkward glances because I was just a baby the last time we met, and they can’t reconcile then and now. My cousins and I form a huddle amidst strangers—-we’re children again, playing in a backyard fort. My grandparents watch the crowd in somber happiness: cursed to outlive their child but alive to see the legacy she built. My nana tells me my mom would be proud of me. I hope so.

Benjamin Uruqhart is a writer and a Club Executive for the MRU Write Club 2024-2025