Little woman

My next-door neighbour is three years old, a budding fashionista. “Top, beautiful. Bottoms, shoes, bag, beautiful. Hair, not beautiful,” was her short and not sweet assessment of my look, from Zara top to scrunched-up hair, yesterday.

She’s a linguist. Today she came up with a new way to say “your brother’s girlfriend”. She said as she stood at her door and I at mine – “Gor Gor – Gor Gor’s – Gor Gor’s Jer Jer has come.”

She’s a security guard. When my parents came home after me, she was able to report to them, “Three people came. Gor Gor, Gor Gor’s Jer Jer and Jer Jer.”

She was the best bit of my day today.

Auntie-killer

Boy was born to my friend, K, mere days after my gym membership ran out. At the age of three weeks, he’s the best boy I know apart from my two brothers and Jay Chou because he smiles a small baby’s smile in my arms. Because he doesn’t cry when I sing a Faye Wong song to him – he is all straight-faced and serious. He is long and one day he will be tall, taller than me. He has as much hair as Rain – or Elvis, to the age bracket to which Rain still means shower. He is better-looking than Rain. He is so new to the thing you and I call life, every breath is an event. Events I follow when he is sound asleep. I like looking at him when he takes a bigger gulp of air than usual and all of him quakes as the air fills his lungs, forces his ribs out and up, then flows down to his toes. When he is wide awake, he is my new trainer.

Like last weekend, when we did weight training (Boy-lifting as his mum lunched), running (Boy-lifting-and-jogging as he didn’t like me sitting on my arse) and Boyrobics (Boy-lifting-and-leaning-from-side-to-side to rock him to sleep). He is no featherweight; my arms were aching after a couple hours. If I was in the gym, I would have put down the weights and gone home light years ago. But Boy is unputdownable. When he was in my arms, I didn’t want him out of them; when he was in his gran’s arms, I wanted him back in mine.

He’s small but his life is large with possibility. It is why I want to hold him. It is what weighs my arms down.