he was always a quiet child, so much so that i couldn't even remember him crying ever since he was a child. we all thought he was born mum or deaf, or both. parents were worried of course, but they - the few pediatricians we consulted - couldn't find anything wrong with him - physically, that is. and then one day, when he was about four, he spoke his first words. everyone in the family was so thrilled it was as if we each won the biggest lottery ever. so that was four times of one Brobdingnagian lottery - priceless. only, it did come with a price after all. turned out that that wasn't the only thing we found out on his fourth year of life. like all mothers who know their children from the inside out, mom had an inkling that something wasn't quite right. and so several trips to the ped's office later, little brother Mark was diagnosed with some savvy medical term that i couldn't remember at that age. (after all, i was only a year older than him, and i wasn't quite as bright as i'd have liked - to which i attributed that cause to the imbalanced distribution of nutrients between my twin sister and myself in mom's womb.) anyway - years later, i found out his condition was called 'savant autism' or 'savant syndrome'. you see, little Mark, an autistic savant, was a special boy. not the normal special as in the 'special' that each of us are (or at least we've been told throughout our lives by our parents). no. Mark could do things normal human beings like you and i couldn't do. doctors said it's due to his condition, and so it gave him a gift in return for his extreme slowness - dad explained to me that it's sort of a trade-off with God. but the fact that he was crippled with some disabilities didn't console my bruised ego because he had this talent that i couldn't have, no matter how hard i tried. i could tell you now that, quite frankly, i was an angry child back then. i was mad at Maya for all the beauty and brain that i didn't have; i was jealous of Mark for his talent and all the attention he'd get from everyone all the time. i, on the other hand, was born of the same parental genes, yet was nothing but an ordinary child (or so i thought, at that time). but when i wasn't busy thinking about my mediocrity, i'd spend most of my time with Mark, watching out for him and admiring the gift that he had. they say memories fade in time, and tiny details would be warped into what we'd had wanted to happen instead. yet there are certain things that try as you might to distort or discard, you just couldn't. Mark and his life story was precisely that to me. i could tell you all the things that happened due to his extraordinary gift, but i could never explain to you what it was that he did, except that it was his art that he created from his genuine heart, and that it involves pipettes, a particular fluid to be pipetted, and the source of which that particular fluid was obtained. his life, to him, really only started when he discovered them... but never would he had imagined his life would end because of them. someday perhaps, i shall sit down and tell you how it all began, to the very end of it, although not all in one sitting. i am an old lady now, and old ladies like me need to pee all the time. like right now. so come back again another day, and we'll go back to the past for a little while. the red spool of tangled mysteries need to be untangled someday. before i go, that is.
footnote: the whole story was actually a dream, but if i were to tell you just the dream itself it'd be too confusing. and since the storyline wasn't in a chronological order, i fear you'd wanna punch me out of frustration after you hear the dream. so to make it more interesting, i created characters with names and added some background info to make it seem more real. i'm also retelling under the guise of an old lady. in my dream, it wasn't that elaborate of course. so read it as a fiction and don't take it too seriously. anyhow, whenever possible, i'll be jotting them down in as many parts as it would take to reiterate the dream. :)
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