Heroes

As a child one needs heroes. And we look for them in the most obvious or peculiar places. We look for them in our parents and grandparents, our extended family, our teachers and peers, in our books or our fantasies. We conjure them up or stumble upon them. Mine was my cousin. Throughout my entire childhood and young adulhood she was one of the constants in my life, sometimes more present than other times, but always present, always just a phonecall away. She still lives down the street from me as she did all through our childhoods and teenaged years, until she left for college. I always felt like I was trying to catch up with her - the minute I started school, she was just leaving primary school, the minute I started highschool at the same school as her, just across the road from our houses, she was a busy senior, studying for the entrance exam to medical school, but who still took the time 

to show her little cousin the ropes in the scary new school, i.e. showing her the bathroom on the ground-floor, near the entrance to the gymnasium, where the older kids congregated during recess to have a smoke. Back then it looked like the coolest thing ever - girls and boys in the same bathroom, kidding around and smoking. Many of the coolest and best memories over the years have her right there, in the middle of all of them - she was forever the instigator, the impulsive one who had the craziest but most rewarding ideas, never able to stop or give up, mind racing a mile a minute, analysing, finding solutions, creating opportunities and new realities, moving mountains, and people. And then the mind started failing and everything stopped and I had to get used to a new reality that still feels so alien even after years - the reality where she technically still lives down the street, though in reality she only lives in her mind. All access denied.