A Super Short story: Arome

Mother said I am an old soul. She said I remind her of her grandmother. She says I must be her reincarnation and I drunk from the well of forgetfulness at the gate into this lifetime.

Mother says a lot of things, most she doesn’t remember, but she remembers her grandmother and so she remembers me. Mother’s grandmother was called Arome Achonu, just like me. Mother speaks weird to me sometimes. She asks me questions and talks about memories I should understand or remember. In those moments, I imagine that my mother escaped from a fairy planet taking over a body that she found by chance.

Hmm!!!

I guess all this crazy talk is inevitable. Mother said I told her that crazy and beauty runs in the Achonu blood. I don’t remember that.

My mother was an orphan who grew up with her grandmother, they bonded over the tragic deaths of their loved ones. People say the grief of Granny Arome’s death broke her.

In her sane moments, when she understood that I was no reincarnation, She would talk about her and look at me with disappointment. I think she hates that I am not everything Granny Arome was. I think she contemplates ‘what if I am’. So I try to show her that I am not.

She said Granny Arome told her that a woman’s pride is in her hair so I shaved mine.  She said Granny Arome was a good woman so I played truant. But all she did was look disappointed and then forget. 

Granted, my Granny Arome was something special. In a time where a woman was to be seen and never heard, she married a malleable man (that’s what mother said) and she made him a wealthy man. She brought ideas, she negotiated his deals, she taught herself Arithmetic and English. When it was unpopular!

But I am not Granny Arome. 

I must be crazy because even though I want her to see me as I am. I love it when she forgets and calls me her soulmate. But then I wonder, when will she see, that I am just a girl trying so hard to get her attention, so she can see that I am not an old soul because I’m young.