When I was a little kid, I remember the first time I watched my grandpa play tennis, and he was great. That moment I decided I wanted to play too.  So  later that day, without him knowing, I went to his room and took his tennis racket. I felt nervous and excited!
But what I didn't know is that the racket was too damn heavy for a four year-old.
I'm sure many of you have been in the same position: when you really want to be great at something but you just can't. And believe me I've been there many times. I wanted so bad to be good at math but I can't even solve a simple operation sometimes.
I want to be a fiction writer but I guess I just don't have it in me.
But no one can blame us for trying, right?
This is a short story a wrote a while ago, in Indonesian, and last week I tried translating it into English so I can post it here for you to read. Please note that grammatical mistakes are like idiots: they're all over the place-though my tennis coach Karen helped me out a bit, and this is my first story so it's kind of stupid so please don't laugh.

I was standing in the supermarket minding my own business-thinking about what fruit to buy, actually-when she handed me a mango and vanished.
When I say vanished, I mean that literally. Into air. Leaving me standing there with an open mouth and a mango in my hand. What astonished me more, even, than the fact of her vanishing was the way she gave me the fruit, pressed it into my hand tenderly, and gently closed my fingers around it. And then she held my hand for a split second.
I'd never seen her before in my life.
The mango remained in my hand and I gazed at it intensely for a moment, you know, just in case it also disappeared.
But it didn't.
So I placed it inside my trolley and walked to the cashier.
The mango sat in my fruitbowl for several days. When I realised it was getting too ripe I ate it. And that night I dreamed.
In front of me is a small, green gate. It was old and it's got lichen all over it. I lay my hands on it and push it open. Its bottom, drags along the ground and creating a scraping sound. I hated the sound.
Suddenly I was awake. When next I went shopping, I approached the fruit section with caution. I hang around there for a bit, trying to look as if I was looking for a perfect avocado before walking away feeling like a fool.
I'd been accused for having an overly active imagination before, and as time goes by I was ready to believe that I had invented the whole thing. Perhaps I need sleep. Maybe in my exhaustion I lost focus in a crucial moment and missed her stepping away from the aisle.
Then, on a coolish March Friday evening,  when I was sitting at the sofa at home, she handed me the remote. And I took it from her as if it were the most natural thing in the world; somehow I just didn't notice anything peculiar.
Later I played those few moments over and over and over again in my head. Out of the corner of my eye, I'd seen her dark hair covering her cheeks as she leened forward to grab the remote. Then when I turned toward her she held it out to me, without looking at me. Her eyes were on the screen. She'd expected my hands would be there to receive it.
Then like before, she vanished. I sat there with the remote in my hand, watching a stupid Jamu commercial, wondering if I was going mad.
That night I dreamed again.
I'm walking along a narrow shady path. The green gate is behind me. Ahead of me, three poles mark a boundary where it leads into what looks like a park. I reach the poles and rest my hand on one of them. I can hear in the distance a faint sound of puppies barking that somehow
turned into the annoying monophonic pip-pip-pip sound of my alarm.
I needed to talk to someone about this.
"So what are you saying", said Dina. "You saw a ghost in the supermarket?"
"She didn't look like a ghost, Deen", I said. "She looked as real as you do right now. She felt real".
"You touched her?"
"No, she touched me! I told you-she put a mango in my hand. And then she kind of squeezed my hand with hers."
"Well, this is isn't some kind of a 'creative visualization' of a mother is it?"

"I know the difference between creative visualization and whatever it is"-I said, a bit offended.
She shrugged, and the conversation moved to other topics.
It was April before I saw her again.

TO BE CONTINUED.

Sorry for making you bored to tears. It's lousy and embarassing but I guess there's always a first time right?