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Tu Anh May 2020
Have you ever wondered
About the youth of your parents
How do they look like
How have they been brought up
How did they meet
How did they fall in love?
How did they make us?

I had these questions with me since i grow up
Probably because my parents aren't that open up
Probably because they were so busy raising us up
Probably because its an Asian thing i assumed privacy as such.
So somehow, to me, parents’ life before us were so blurry and doesn't seem to ever existed
Not until the day i had my mom on the back of the scooter
As we rode to the temple where we store the leftover of our beloved dad

She told me about their past
A young guy in his teenager days
Lay eyes on her as they met on a communal working day
He asked for her hand before summoned military service
Not directly to her but through a relative
She forgot him as soon as she left for college
Busy chasing her love life, never heard from him in thousand days, he was too far away.

When the war over, he returned home, she was working in a distant village
He refused my grandpa’s arrangement, went on a journey to seek
For his first and only girl he ever fallen in love with
He found mom after her 5 or 6 failure romances.
They started distant relationship for a while before getting married.
She continued working in the faraway village and he returned to military service
To serve in another “nonsense war” (this is my words)

And honestly i still cant imagine how did they make us
‘Cause i never seen them holding hands, showing affection in front of us
But its real - they do fall in love
They do have their heyday before us

And even though i never seen them talking about love
I now realized its just a different way of showing how they love
By fighting; yet, taking care of each other for better or worse
By sometimes hurting each other...
But at the end of the day, one can change other’s diaper when he can no longer move

I cant tell if he was the love of her life when she decided to tight the knot.
But looking at her shivering shoulder, her teary eyes now every time we talk
About our beloved and only man
and whatever reminded us of him
I can think of nothing to explain but love

Have you ever wondered
How did our parents live before having us?
And how would you tell your future children
About your youth...

— The End —