The truth is that nothing really happened in Paris. Still, I lost things. Felt pieces of my life slip through my fingers like dry sand, and all I’m left with now is the shards that stuck to my skin. Really, it could have happened anywhere. But it happened in Paris.
There’s no good way to start this story because I don’t remember the exact moment I fell in love with her. I can tell you what it felt like: it felt like March. Like the bread we used to bake together and a flower made from newspaper clippings. Like red velvet and a leather jacket traded back and forth. It felt delicate, like a plate waiting to crack. But there was something broken about it from the very beginning. I knew from the start that there was no way to win.
I don’t need to describe her to you. You know she was beautiful. Tiringly so—by the end it was almost exhausting to look at her. I know I’m not the only one who felt this. Did you really think I was the only one who loved her? No. The whole world did.
Which is why—though I can’t tell you when I began to love her—I can tell you precisely the moment I started to hate her. Ironically, Paris started that, too. The summer before our last year of high school, she went to Europe with her father who was either a lawyer or ran a weed company—it was never really clear which one. The issue wasn’t that she was away. It was that she had been introduced to the real world, and the real world told her she was beautiful—better than other girls—and she believed it. Bathed herself in the praise like a dove languidly rolling in its birdbath, swallowing compliments like drugs, doling out bored sighs when someone spoke about something other than herself.
As hard as it was to be in love with her, stopping was the easiest thing in the world. The person I had loved simply didn’t exist anymore.
Now it’s June in Paris. Just friends, like we always had been. It’s us and our friend Rachel; there to bridge the gap between us. While we are hot-headed, easy to anger, Rachel is calm and sweet, the purest person I’ve ever met to this day. If sand was slipping through my fingers, Rachel was there, scooping it up and putting it back in my hands.
The first night, Rachel and I leave her sleeping in the apartment (tiny, bright green, and busy, above a bar in Montmartre called Les Innocents) and walk to get groceries, chatting trivially. I eat a nectarine as it starts to rain, hot and thick, pressing our hair to our foreheads. When we return home I am sticky; water and fruit juice dripping down my palms. Rachel and I find her with wet hair and a men’s t-shirt on. TEXAS, it reads, the biggest country in one state. We make a salad and split an eclair into three parts. She hasn’t said more than a few words to me since I got here and I know, somehow, that this trip is doomed before it’s even begun.
The next day is the start of a heat wave that chases us all the way until we’re on the plane back home. It’s stifling, almost dirty, the kind of heat that gets under your fingernails and fucks with your mind. The kind of heat that makes teenage girls hate each other, sitting silently at restaurants pettily sucking on straws and fighting about which metro stop was the right one. Worse, Paris is crowded this time of year, meaning you have to shoulder your way through the streets and train cars, a thousand trapped people breathing in unison. I had known both of them for years, and never had there been an absence of things to talk about. Now, silences followed us wherever we went. The heat made us strangers.
We learn to exist with each other in the night, when the air isn’t so oppressive and the streets clear out, allowing the entire city to ourselves. We wear black boots and wander in no particular direction, trying to find a bar that’s open—any at all. The one we settle at has an awning covered in fake ivy and no one’s there save the bartender. We irritate him by ordering three waters. I’m wearing a green crocheted dress and I feel like I probably look like a little girl. She sits to my right—applying her lipstick in the reflection of a spoon. She’s going on about the submarine that went missing off the coast of St. Johns and periodically checks her phone for updates from the New York Times. Rachel and I indulge her. None of us know that the submarine and all its inhabitants are already dead.
We sit outside with our waters, and soon after we arrive a second group sits down next to us. There’s a girl smoking a cigarette and three men, and the girl is talking enough for all four of them. They don’t seem to mind—nodding along cheerfully. The girl startles us by asking where we’re from. California, we answer, and she delights in this because she just returned from a trip to San Diego, where a man had asked her to marry him. She doesn’t tell us what she said, but she’s here in Paris—so. One of her friends leans over and whispers to her in French.
“He says you are the loveliest women in all of Paris,” she grins. Something curls in my stomach, an envy. A feeling that he’s talking to Rachel and her, not me. All of their eyes wander past me, and, yeah, I get it. She’s the kind of woman you write songs about. Believe me, I’ve written them. And I’m wearing a crocheted dress, green like our apartment walls, and I feel like a little girl.
The day after that one is the fête de la musique: the festival of music. The streets are swarmed with people and I’m wearing Rachel’s skirt. The girl from the night before had invited us to one of her friend’s venues, and we showed up with hopeful, bright faces. All three of us were in awe of the girl; all wanted to be her a bit, and thought that we would spend the rest of our night with her, but she leaves us quite alone five minutes after we meet up with her, and we’re forced to keep wandering, to the next venue and then the next. It’s dark out when we find a hidden alcove of dancing bodies, cornered away in an empty street, all bad outfits and worse music. Three stories above us, two young men hang out of their windowsill, smoking. I am pressed to Rachel, hot even though it’s the middle of the night, and my feet ache.
“What d’you think we have to do to get invited up there?” I shout, glancing up at the boys. It’s a joke, but she takes it seriously—has something to prove. I should’ve stayed quiet, for the minute she turns and makes eye contact with them, they beckon us up eagerly. Once we’ve climbed the stairs, however, it becomes abundantly clear that they won’t talk to us—don’t even offer us anything to drink. Liked the idea of having pretty girls in their apartment but didn’t know what to do about it when the time came. The music floats up through the window, and she sits on the ledge, holding Rachel’s hand and swaying silently. We haven’t talked today at all, really. There are lights that cast neon shadows over her face, dousing everything in a sickly yellow, and I realize that I want badly to go home. Not the apartment. Home, California.
The days following, I have a backache that chases me around the city. We walk everywhere, go everywhere, never allowing ourselves a chance to face the black mass of words that have piled onto our shoulders; things that are thought but not said. I haven’t been in love with her, not for a long time, and in Paris there is no before and after, there’s only here, and now, and I hate you so much I can hardly look at you.
Our flight home is at four in the morning on a Saturday, and Rachel suggests that we stay up until then—no reason to only get two hours of sleep. We go out dancing in red and black dresses in a jazz club that’s really more like a cave, with live music and swing dancers that looked like they’d been pulled out of the 1950s. It’s crowded, and we have to sit in the very back, on stairs that lead to a sealed-off tower, and everything is beautiful but also wrong. An Australian man is seated next to us, and when Rachel and I go off to dance he starts talking to her, accent so thick that when she recounts the story to her father on the car ride home, she says that she hadn’t understood a word he was saying. I need some air, I tell Rachel, and we step outside to let the wind wash over our skin. I light a cigarette—she hates cigarettes—but halfway through my second draw I feel sick, dizzy, and the neon sign glows like the devil in front of me.
“Put it out,” Rachel says gently, shoveling sand back into my pocket. “Put it out.” I do, and the ashes twinkle like stars on the concrete before I bring my foot down, and somewhere, I ignite a supernova. I’m sorry, I want to say.
Back in the bar she’s done with the Australian man, sipping on her drink and when she sees me she takes my hand. Leads me to the dance floor, and it’s like none of this ever happened. Spins me around and we’re in the theatre and it’s Halloween, and Tim Curry’s singing Rose Tint My World on the big screen. I’m Janet and she’s Rocky and Paris never existed in the first place. This is maybe the last time I’ll ever look at her and think she’s someone I could love again. We go home—California—and don’t speak. She goes to New York, and doesn’t say goodbye.
So, yes, I did lose her. Lost parts of myself, too, because for much of my life, loving her was me. And it’s possible, if you were to walk the streets of Paris for long enough, you’d find bits of sand, dusting the places where we began to fade.
It was an easy place to get lost in. Giant, cold – a stranger’s house on an overcast day. A wire fence that looked dangerous, an impossible amount of bright-colored plastic toys, grass too green for the summertime. Kids older than me chasing each other around, all muddy shins, tangled hair. Someone was grilling; everyone was drinking. I bounce on the bottom of a shallow, smooth pool. It is cool, and wonderful. The skirt of my swimsuit billows out in a small circle around me. I am five and round-bellied, look just like my father. I have no idea. In an instant, I slip underwater. Survival takes over, badly, and I flail my skinny arms, gasp for air. Men dive in in their three-piece suits to save me from five feet of water. I do not know where my parents are.
After this, I am put in swim lessons. Later, they tell me they assumed I knew how to swim, the way most children do. That it couldn’t have been more than five feet of water – that I must have just… panicked. The teacher is a brown-haired woman with wire-rimmed glasses and a hardworking face. She teaches me to swim, and like most things, I never become particularly great, just better. At nine I aged out of lessons and was put on “team.” Team did not compete, we were just the group they had little left to teach. I was the youngest one there by years, too small to use the adult equipment, too weak for most of the exercises. They tried to teach us about survival by pushing us in the deep end in our winter clothes, boots and all, asking us to swim up from the bottom. I almost couldn’t; struggled to the edge to hold myself up for air, fingertips gripping at slippery, blackening tiles. Another time, they strapped weights to our ankles and again, asked us to swim up. This time: I couldn’t do it. Someone with common sense would have pried the weights off their ankles, but I am not someone with common sense. I struggled and resolved myself to drowning, peacefully. The oldest girl in the class, Miranda, had to dive in to save me. Then, I thought Miranda was as old as I would ever be. She was probably sixteen, and could hold her breath for minutes at a time. I was never fully convinced she was real. Still, I loved the water. Even the year I worried there were dead people down there, who might wake up and drag me down, I loved it.
They enrolled my little brother in swim lessons too, the kind where toddlers bounce in the water with a parent and sing happy songs. They were hoping to escape the embarrassment of yet another drowned child, and they would. He hated the water. He’d claw his way up our mother until he clung to her curly head of hair, screaming. At the time, I made fun of him. I was always making fun of him. But he was terrified. I know why I did that, I just wish I didn’t. While he begged to return to the womb, my father and I poured over an outdated workbook – you know the kind, all penmanship, math, being Good. We’d sit in the back of the room, cross-legged on the perpetually wet carpet, flipping through page after page, the spiral-bound book balanced on a green rubbermaid tub full of chemicals. The air was too thick for my father to breathe, but I didn’t understand these things, then. Bodies, maybe. Fears. They were conquerable, inconsequential.
I had an aunt that lived what I considered the perfect life on Cape Cod. She was older, alone, and showed no sign of stopping. Her house was small and empty; I hoped that I, too, would one day live in a small, empty house that smelled of nothing in particular. Best of all, she shared a pool with the other people in her neighborhood. When you return to a place, over and over again, you develop rituals. We’d dive in, even though we weren’t supposed to. It was thrilling. We’d race to the other end of the pool. The first time I won, I was just small enough that things like being the fastest mattered, and praise stuck. I was something close to proud.
My father was six-foot-eight at the time, and like me, mostly legs. He’d stand in the deep end so we could swim loops around his ankles, count how many. I don’t remember the number anymore. If I had anything to say about it, it was an even one. Always in pairs, like Noah’s arc. He’d let us climb up and stand on his shoulders to dive into the water. Me, my brother. Once, my cousins. Strangers, even. I don’t know why. He looked like exactly the kind of person I would never trust a child with, but everyone loved him. Dangerous faces, us. Always getting away with things. But, I suppose he had calm eyes. Used to be a teacher. So there, at the pool, people would loan their children off to swim with us, a tiny school of fish, a giant.
People like me can’t really afford rituals. I get that from him, too. There is no threshold to obsession, we begin there. Every time we left, flips backwards and forwards, crawling along the bottom of the deep end, spinning like a barrel, handstands, different types of dive, swimming from front to back. The way he taught me to empty my lungs, slow my heart, and sink to the bottom. Because it could be the last time. Either my last time as a child… or just the last. And at some point, it was. I am my mother, now. The water is always too cold. I am probably too weak to swim now. My limbs have atrophied, my lungs always let me down.
He keeps going, though. He still hoists us up to his shoulders when we are far too big and they are far too destroyed. Three shoulder replacements and they never took. We will have that in common, one day. His arms don’t work, and still, he is faster than me. His heart fails, and still he is faster than me. The summer he breaks his neck, he cannot right himself in the pool. We joke he’s like a turtle on his back. My brother watches to make sure he doesn’t get stuck on his stomach, facedown in the water. In swim class, this is called the dead man’s float. We dive in together for the last time and I win and it is devastating. Reality unravels and suddenly he is deteriorating all at once, in real and rapid time. He is dying before my eyes. Everyone is. Why did I have to try?
Today, the doctors are always telling me to swim. There is no treatment for living the kind of life I do, so this is not a solution, just another thing to ask me to do instead of helping me, because the science hasn’t caught up to our bodies, yet. Always, water. Drink it until you drown. Swim until you prune away. Become water and drain yourself from our lives, return to the sea, devolve, evaporate from our world.
There’s a girl across the table not much older than me, listening to my father list out his life and manipulating my hand. Open, close, open, close. His heart was failing quietly for the past few years, and now he’s more scar tissue than soul. His spine has been fused because our bones disintegrate. He can’t feel his legs, at least a handful of his organs don’t work on their own, there isn’t a joint in his body that hasn’t been operated on. We get all the rarest cancers. The cause of it all is one in a million. I feel a tendon I didn’t know was there snap.
Last summer’s doctor sees us in the halls and asks how I’ve been feeling, so I fix my limp and don’t answer her. These people are used to making everyone better. Sometimes I wonder if that’s why no one will believe us: our truth is impossible to live with. We won’t get better, and we won’t die fast enough. We cannot be fixed; we will not feel better soon. We are not what was promised.
Sometime in the fall, we are each taking twenty-eight different pills. Some of them are the same, and we keep mine when I switch over for when we inevitably run out. Our bodies have broken down in the same ways; the only difference, really, is the speed. In some ways, it’s good to have grown up with him. I have seen the incisions on a spine split open and repaired them. I have seen blood pool under the skin of an entire torso. I was four when I learned to fill syringes with insulin, to measure and tap and push. I have treated more wounds, seen the inside of more surgical units, been next door to dozens of people as they died. I have grown so bored with near-death that I’ve learned to ask when I answer calls whether or not something is survivable. I have seen so much blood.
He was so angry when I was growing up. I always thought he was just a bad person. It has taken almost twenty years for me to understand that it wasn’t just this: that he, like me – that I, like him – am just a person who is in pain. That just as we have the same bodies, we have the same brains, and that science hasn’t figured out how to numb either of these things, yet. He lays in the sun and imagines himself out of his body. I take medicine after medicine and am angry, again. And I wait for another fifty years of living with this body, and this brain, and this person.
The doctor, again, tells us to swim. I tell them the last time they dissected my father, they asked $600 for thirty minutes in a public pool, one specialist to thirty people. I don’t tell them that sometimes, it is too expensive for us to survive intact. We are quiet on the drive home, return to our small lives: everything is medication, holding ourselves together, staring at the ceiling until things are different. Water, water, water. We are unstable and cruel and we are still alive. After all this time, we are beginning to understand each other, again.
Everything aches.
After my parents divorced and before my father took his own life, he got an apartment on the top floor of an old building. It wasn’t the worst part of town, but it was far from the best. The kitchen was simple and outdated, yet it was where he got to be his best self. A machinist by day, he was also a talented cook. In this kitchen, he made spinach fettuccine Alfredo from scratch, hanging the green strands of pasta anywhere and everywhere to dry. Before buffalo wings were a thing, he fried split chicken wings in his countertop wok and served them lightly smothered in buttered hot sauce, but on this day, he came home from work, opened a can of Progresso lentil soup and heated it up in a pan on top of the oven. “MMmmm,” he said out loud after taking the first warm bite and thought to himself, “Maybe I can do this.” His marriage was dead, but he wasn’t – not yet anyway.
In this apartment, I saw my father in a way I never got to see before. He kept the place spotless. He had a hip fashion sense and meticulously cared for his clothing. He had surprisingly good taste in TV shows, movies, and music which he recorded onto blank tapes with handwritten labels that he displayed on a bookshelf in alphabetical order. He had beautiful handwriting. He was fancy! He drank Corona beer with a slice of lime pushed through the opening and Dr. Pepper heated up and garnished with a floating orange slice.
I remember sitting on the couch in that apartment watching episodes of “The Simpsons” while holding hands with my dad after he served us thoughtful and delicious meals of spinach salads or buttery cajun shrimp and rice. It was neat and tidy all around us. I felt safe, loved, and cared for.
I remember finding out that my mother eloped while I was in this apartment. We got a call from her late one Saturday night, “Do you remember Eddie?” a man that had given us a ride home from the grocery store the previous week. Eddie was a drummer she met two weeks prior at the bar where she worked. My home with my mother never felt safe after that, and one day, she called my Dad to tell him that I would need to move in with him. He ended his life a couple of days later in a park downtown.
43 minutes. 43 minutes is how long it takes me to transform myself. I feel my weightless body press against my silky, white sheets. The room is dim, but the windows are warmly lit and every morning, make the dresser appear as a shadow. It looks large in front of my bed, like a mountain daring you to climb it. I’ve always thought it was just the shadows of the trees outside. Letting out a sigh, I feel my feet effortlessly graze the floor, landing gently onto it. Dancing in the bedroom, I raise my lace shirt over my arms, watching it elegantly float to the ground.
20 minutes before I leave. 20 minutes before I have to see the most influential, yet somehow insignificant people in my life. I pace over to the mountain, sliding the drawers open. I drag on the tightest, skinniest jeans I can find. They scrunch around all the curves in my body. I pull on the slimmest long sleeve cropped top, tugging away the fabric in discomfort. I think to myself, “I should change.” The fabric is clinging to my arms, clenching around my body, but I have to remind myself what they will all see. The most beautiful slim figure that enters the room and is sure to turn eyes.
Next up, my dirty blonde hair becomes pin straight. I grab the hot pink beauty blender next to me, viciously dabbing my face with concealer, foundation, anything I can get to cover up, really. My eyelashes become extended and curled. One time my friend told me that I had long eyelashes, so I need to keep up that appearance. My eyelids become painted with a gold shimmer. I catch a glimpse of the shine as I look to my side and I can’t help but smile. They are going to love this.
My light pink lips become a dark, striking cherry red. I can feel my stomach grumbling, but I don’t have time to worry about hunger when the people that pass me in the hallway don’t see me internally. A thought passes my mind, becoming all I can think about. One time, I was sitting with my friends, a group of about 10 people, after school outside of Toms, an old roadside shack. It is off the side of the road of a long, busy street surrounded by trees. The cars go so fast that they almost miss it. I had ordered some fries because I wasn’t sure I was hungry. Some friends ordered a lot of food, while some just ate from other’s meals. Assuming that was the norm, I offered the group some of my fries. I said, “There’s too many, if anyone wants some, you can have it”. One of the guys said, “You can’t eat sixteen fries?” another girl chimed in, “She’s so skinny she can’t even eat sixteen fries.” In utter shock, sitting on the picnic table, feeling the breeze hit my back, I looked around and not a single friend said anything. The fullness filled my stomach and the fries went straight to the trash. This is why I am here for the tenth time this morning fixing my hair to obtain perfection, ignoring my resentful stomach.
I grab my signature black eyeliner from my vanity. While most people would paint a thin line on their eyelid, I draw not only the thickest black mark above my eye, but also far below my eye, giving it a highly attractive and unique appearance, sure to draw attention. Maybe this is the only way to rebel.
I look at the clock. Only 5 minutes left. I sprint down the stairs and grab the tallest black heels I can find, aiming to appear taller. I remember one time I was walking in the middle school hallway with a guy in my grade. He told me that I wasn’t tall enough. “You blend right in”, he said.
Walking into the kitchen, I shake off everything. The hunger, the thoughts, the scrunching fabric around my arms. I pour a little bit of coffee and take one cookie. Because I know that will be all I have to eat today.
“Honey come down, something’s wrong with him!” my mom called. I ran down as quickly as I could. I could hear the thuds from my feet stomping on the wooden stairs. The railings leaned as I bore my weight against them. My feet slid on the wooden floor as I tried to sprint. My heart was pounding, and my vision blurred. What happened? I thought to myself. I was running so fast that I could’ve fallen. But surprisingly, I didn’t. I then approached the cream tile floors and saw Rover. He was frail, and lying on the ground. His fur almost blended in with the tiles. He lifted his head to look at me. His eyes drooped to a point where I could see the pain and suffering in his eyes. My cat was sitting by his head. My mom was sitting on the ground by his feet petting him. She never sits on the ground like that, I know it hurts her knee. “It’s ok honey,” she said to him. I came running over and sat down next to him.
“Mom, what happened?” I asked.
“Honey I tried taking Rover for a walk. He couldn’t even stand up.”
“Well, what’s the plan?” I asked. “Could we take him to the vet?”
“ Ellington Animal Clinic is closed, so he can’t see Dr. Prichard. I’ll try calling Bolton.”
My mom dialed the number. Rover coughed, a hoarse troubled cough. He couldn’t breathe properly in those moments he coughed. I kept stroking his head. “It’s ok, you’ll be ok.”
“They can’t take him.” My mom said as she hung up the call. “I’ll call Middletown, he was supposed to go there anyway to see the oncologist.”
My mom dialed the number again. After moments of Rover coughing and me stroking his head, my mom hung up.
“They can take him. I’ll call your sibling and we’ll get Rover in the car right now.”
My mom painfully stood up. She looked down at him while I stayed sitting down beside him. The cat came up to him and nudged his head. The cat must’ve been trying to reassure him, or say goodbye.
My dad came with our other dog, Booger. Booger looked at Rover for a good minute before running upstairs. My dad said he was upset and anxious, and I believe him. Booger always had separation anxiety from Rover.
My sibling, Aswini, came down the stairs. His eyes widened and he frowned the second he saw Rover. My mom updated Aswini as he was setting up the car. Aswini then lifted Rover and placed him in the car. He then sat in the driver’s seat, and my mom sat in the passenger seat. I sat in the back with Rover. We both were sitting on a red blanket, and there were plastic bags stuffed into the pockets inside the doors of the car. We knew how car-sick he would usually get. I stared at the GPS in the car. Our destination was 51 minutes away. That’s almost an hour. I thought. What if it’s too late?
I tried calming myself down. As Rover was coughing, I was leaning over and petting his head. “You’ll be ok, it’ll be ok Rover” I kept repeating. I tried looking out the window and listening to music. But the only music I could stand listening to was sad. Tears started rolling
down my face. I tried wiping them with my hand the best I could. Don’t cry, I thought. If he sees you cry, he’s gonna be sad. My mom and my sibling were silent. It was surprising since they would usually argue and scream back and forth when either one of them was driving. Trees kept blending in with each other. The road looked distorted. And the sun was out. I hated the sun being out, I thought. It should be raining, not sunny.
We finally reached the vet. My mom, Aswini, and I jumped out of the car to get Rover. Rover tried to use all of his strength to stand on all fours, but the second he tried to move, he wobbled vigorously. Aswini picked him up and while carrying him, I rushed to the door to open it for them. The Vet tech was standing in the lobby. They took Rover in their arms, said that the doctor was going to call my mom, and brought Rover to one of the exam rooms. My mom, Aswini, and I plopped down on the bench in the lobby. Seconds felt like minutes which felt like hours. I pulled out my headphones and tried to distract myself. But again, I couldn’t. Tears started rolling down my face under my mask. I rested my head on my mom’s shoulder. Thank god she didn’t see me cry. Aswini did though.
After what felt like an eternity later, my mom’s phone rang. She immediately picked it up and walked outside. Aswini and I stayed on the bench, watching her through the window as she conversed with the doctor. I tried my best to notice her expression. Did it look like she was screaming at the doctor? Was she smiling? Was she making any big gestures? I couldn’t tell what was happening, and I don’t think Aswini could either. This call was taking a while. It had been 10 minutes, and she was still talking. Aswini got up and headed for the doors. I got up and followed him. We walked down the stairs and up a path towards my mom on the phone.
“Mhm, mhm,” she said at first. I thought the doctor had a lot of information, and that Rover was going to need a lot of treatment, but that wasn’t true.
“Can I just have five minutes please?” my mom said as her voice started breaking. Is it that bad? I thought. My mom never cries, like ever.
My mom hung up. Tears started rolling down her face as she shook her head. Aswini hugged her and then burst into tears. I, of course, was crying too.
“He’s going to be euthanized,” my mom said while sniffling. “There’s fluid in his heart that can’t be diffused.”
My stomach dropped and my chest pounded. I couldn’t breathe with my mask on, so I took it off. It was covered in snot and tears. This couldn’t be it, I thought. I would no longer embrace his hugs as he would rest his paws on my shoulders. I would no longer have my arm scratched by him pulling it closer for more cuddles. An image flashed in my mind. This image was an image of Rover as a puppy when I first met him. My mom kept him on her lap for me to see. He came up to me and licked my face immediately. That moment had always made me happy whenever I’d think about it. But now, it makes me cry.
He won’t see me when I’m in college, I thought. He won’t see me grow up as an adult. How am I going to navigate life without him?
It has now been a year and a half since Rover passed. People have always asked me how I navigate life without him. But the truth is, I don’t because he hasn’t left us. I see him in the sunsets he paints whenever I come home or when Booger got discharged from the hospital after his surgery. I see him in the wind as it blows the tears away from my face when I cry. I see him in the clouds shaped just like him. Sure he may not physically be here. But I know that he will always be with me, and watch over me no matter what.
When I am faced with the possibility of death, I do the most inappropriate thing thinkable: I laugh. Let me tell you how I discovered this random piece of information about myself.
It is a day before Christmas Eve that my roommate, Franka, and I decide to drive to the farther Walmart. It is less our generous nature rather than the fact that we are the only ones with a car out of our nine housemates. We shovel, shovel, shovel until we can see our car’s wheels. I push, push, push and Franka steps on the gas until the car finally moves.
“It is a bit windy,” she says clutching the stirring wheel with a force that makes her knuckles turn white.
We stop at a Tim Horton’s drive-through to get two large mochas. Legs crossed, phone in one hand and the red paper cup in the other, we sing along to some 90’s tunes. We live very secluded in the Rocky Mountains so the next Walmart is far, about two hours from us. We are on the road.
“It is a bit icy,” Franka says leaning forward as if she has a better view from closer to the steering wheel.
I change the song and she relaxes. 90 km/h on one of the most scenic roads I have ever seen in my life. The high mountains scraping the sky make me feel very small.
“It is a bit slippery on the highway,” Franka says. Her voice is just a whisper.
We leave the thick forest behind and find ourselves on a bridge. The frozen river beneath is covered in a fresh layer of snow and barely distinguishable from the shore. Franka adjusts her grip on the steering wheel, her whole body alert. Her fear almost tangible. That is when I feel the strong gush of wind tearing at our car. We start swiveling. I say her name – Franka, Franka, Franka. Do you know what you shouldn’t do when you lose control of the car on an icy road driving 90 km/h? You should under no circumstances hit the breaks. Franka does. I blink and we turn. I see cars coming towards us. I blink and we turn. I see the lake rushing towards us, too fast. I blink and we turn, turn, turn. We come to an abrupt halt. I don’t remember how exactly we get there. I am not even sure I really saw all those things. I look at Franka who lifts her hands in the air as if the steering wheel has burned her. I see tears rolling down her cheeks, dropping down into her lap.
That is the moment I start laughing. I put the car into park and look at the cars coming towards us at a speed that promises to make this accident into a spear fight with only one survivor. I am still laughing. We can’t get out of the car because we are literally on thin ice. I have to do something. Where is my phone? Where is my phone? Where is my phone? I have to call for help. I must have dropped it. Thoughts enter and leave my mind so fast I can’t hold on to a single one of them. Where did the music go? Is Franka hurt? I lean through the gap between the front seats. A book, a single glove, a fork. Where is my phone? I am still laughing. Tears prick my eyes. There is a knock on my window. I roll it down. The man scans Franka’s face, her hands still in the air and tears streaming down her face. He turns to me.
“We called an ambulance,” he pauses and glances at Franka. “You both still look beautiful,” he adds. What an odd thing to say, I think. My laughter turns into a sobby giggle.
“You can’t stay here. Let’s see if you can turn on the car.” He looks at Franka who vehemently shakes her head. I lean over the middle console and turn the key in the ignition. The car springs to life.
“Step lightly on the gas and we’ll push. You just have to move a few feet to be back on safe terrain,” he orders. I don’t know who ‘we’ is.
I turn to Franka whose eyes are already red-rimmed. She looks at me and shakes her head again. The tears have stopped but her hands remain in the air. “I can’t. I can’t. I can’t,” she repeats. “Can you do it?”
“You can,” I answer. I don’t want to admit it but I am scared. My hands are shaking. “It’s okay,” I say more for my sake than hers but she puts her hands back on the steering wheel. The rest becomes a blurred memory. I still laugh when someone hands me a big chunk of our car that I throw in the trunk.
Sometimes I think about the accident. Sometimes I tell strangers about the accident. I laugh and they laugh with me. Sometimes people don’t believe me when I tell them that when I am faced with the possibility of death, I laugh fear in the face.
My mother and I looked at each others’ reflections. Her gorgeous dark curls hung loosely around her hunched shoulders, and with tired eyes, she scanned herself in the mirror – her curves and scars, even the stubborn stretch marks, all those little details she never missed, but made her the gorgeous being she is. Marks highlighting all the battles she fought to bring two daughters to life; and all the nights she spent without sleeping, tending to their needs. With gloomy eyes that were once radiant, she scrutinized every inch of her feebly firm figure until they met mine. She half-smiled. At that moment, I heard all the screams and cries of the life she left behind – a girl, barely a woman yet, robbed of her 20s and married off at 19. I heard her muffled cries, and tear-stained pillows when her support system collapsed as friends she held dear, deliberately drifted apart. She stretched and tried and tired herself juggling between starting a family and pursuing a degree. I heard her bend and break as she bled life force into me. Suddenly, the girl in her was buried alive as she was reborn as a mother. And I also heard, the laughter and joys of the life she then embraced; the songs she hummed to lure me to sleep; her squeals as I took my very first step, the tears of pride she shed on my first day of school and my last. She didn’t even utter a word and I heard her.
I broke the trance, almost scared to disrupt the deafening silence, as I whispered in a shaky voice, “Thank you, Ma.”
She gazed at me with no emotions this time. A second passed, and then another. An unfamiliar emotion sparked in her eyes as she stared right through me, stripping me bare. She looked at me – like really looked at me. I stood there feeling naked amidst the layers of clothing covering me. I wrapped my hands around myself feeling more conscious than ever. Averting my gaze I saw myself in the mirror, fidgeting with the hem of my shirt with flushed cheeks, and curious eyes, full of life but too shy to meet hers. She looked at me through the mirror and in front of her, I was an untouched porcelain doll; not one scratch. In my eyes, she was the art of Kintsugi – broken but beautiful with all her scars of gold. She smiled a melancholic smile as she saw herself in me. At least all of her that once was.
She has that rare mental health condition in which a person thinks they see dead bodies, but they never really are dead bodies. She’ll see, out of the corner of her eye, a dark shape, and her mind thinks “dead body,” but it’s always just a log or a trash bag. When driving, she used to pull over and check to make sure, never finding anything. It happened so often, she eventually stopped checking. On her drive home from work today, she thought she saw one, this time appearing to be a body wrapped in plastic laying off the side of the road. “Just a sheet of plastic playing a trick on me,” she thought to herself as she kept driving. “I’m finally getting a grip on this,” she proudly thought to herself. “My therapist will be so proud of me.”
When she got home, she turned on the TV for background noise as she undressed in the kitchen. She tossed her dirty clothes into the washer, pulled her comfortable house pants out of the dryer, and slipped into them. She pulled her house shirt out of the dryer, and she heard, “Dead body found on Route 7.” She stood there frozen with her shirt above her head, as years of therapy melted off her half-naked body. Her eyes scanned the apartment for dead bodies, which only moments before she would have known was an unreasonable thing to do. Her eyes stopped on the half-open bedroom door. It was dark, but she could make out a figure lying on the bed. She closed her eyes, took deep breaths, and counted to five. She opened her eyes, and the figure was still there.
As quickly as she could, she pulled down her shirt, grabbed her keys, and ran barefoot out of the apartment. She lived in a small one-bedroom upstairs from a larger family unit, but the family who lived there was not home. She ran down the stairs and outside to the driveway. She got into her car and started to drive. It was fall, the evening temperature was dropping, and here she was in her house clothes with no jacket, no bra, no underwear, and no shoes. She drove the five or so minutes to the small city’s police department. She sat in her car, slowing -but not entirely successfully- regaining her grip.
A loud knock on the window brought her back into reality. “Are you okay?,” asked a police officer as he winds his fist in the universal symbol to roll down the window. “I… I… I don’t know. I think someone may be in my apartment,” she answered. “Okay, ma’am, I’m Officer Matthews. What is your name?,” he said. “Amy Morgan. I live at 44 Dawes Ave. in the upstairs apartment.”
“Okay, let’s get you inside, fill out a report, and we’ll get some officers over there to check it out.”
Officer Matthews walked Amy inside the station, leaving her with Nancy, the female desk agent who led her to a warm room, wrapped her in a blanket, and made her a cup of hot tea. She even found a pair of slipper socks, of the hospital-issued variety, to give to her. Matthews poked his head in to check on her. “Okay, Ms. Morgan. We are heading over to the apartment now and will be back shortly. If you need anything, let Nancy know.”
“I… I need my anxiety medication. It’s in the medicine cabinet. Please bring it back for me,” she replied as she looked around to make sure she didn’t see anything resembling a body. She didn’t. The brightly lit room was bare save for a table, four wooden chairs, and a large mirror hung on the wall.
Matthews and his partner got in their cruiser, turned on the lights, and drove over to Dawes Ave. The downstairs family was just returning from the sons’ soccer game. Mr. and Mrs. Amuso sent the boys inside and greeted the officers who explained the situation. Mrs. Amuso ran into the house to be with the boys and Mr. Amuso waited on the porch as the officers climbed the stairs. The door to Amy’s apartment was open. “Police!,” yelled the officers. Guns engaged, the two scope out the place. “Clear!” “Clear!” “Clear!” “Clear!” There was no-one there. There was no one and nothing on the neatly made bed. There was no sign of forcible entry and no sign of trespassing. They turned off the TV which was still on, grabbed the bottle of medication, locked up, assured the now uneasy Amuso family that the coast was clear, and headed on back to the station.
Upon their return, Matthews sat down across from Amy and slid the bottle of medication over to her. She opened the bottle, took a pill, and washed it down with the now cold tea. “I heard on the TV that there was a dead body found. Was there a dead body found just outside of town on Route 7, wrapped in plastic? Is this true?,” she asked. The officers looked at each other with a knowing look. The exact location of the body, and the fact that it had been wrapped in plastic, were pieces of information that had not been released to the public. “A body was found, yes.” Matthews replied. “What makes you think it was wrapped in plastic?”
“Because I saw it.”
“You saw it? Why didn’t you call 911?”
“Because… I… I see things…that aren’t there. I thought it wasn’t real. That’s what these pills are for.”
“That explains what she saw, or didn’t see, in her apartment,” Matthews said to his partner, who made the note on the report.
“Look,” Amy explained, “I don’t hallucinate. I see things that are there, but… I think they are things that they aren’t… like dead bodies. My mind plays tricks on me. I saw something on my bed tonight, I know I did. I just don’t know what.” The two offers looked at each other with an understanding.
Upon the officer’s insistence, Amy checked herself in for an overnight at the local mental health crisis care facility. It was better than going home, plus she wondered if she really was losing her grip. It was a Friday night, so she didn’t have to worry about taking the next day off from work, which was good because she promised to return to the station the next day to answer more questions.
When she got to the facility, it was late, and she hadn’t eaten since noon. The cafeteria was closed, but there was a “late-night” menu card, from which late check-ins could order a meal. The choices were limited, “turkey or tuna on wheat.” She circled tuna, add lettuce, add tomato, and hold the cheese. “Strawberry or lime jello.” She circled strawberry even though she knew she wouldn’t eat it.
When the tray arrived, she lifted the hospital-grade cloche to reveal a plate with a scoop of tuna in a plastic cup, two slices of bread, a leaf of lettuce, a slice of tomato, and a jello cup that just said “red” on the foil lid. There was a salt and pepper packet, and the only utensil was a plastic spoon, which was fine with her. She assembled her sandwich, and took a bite. “Surprisingly, not bad,” she thought as she finally started to feel like herself again.
The nurse administered a sedative that was prescribed by the on-call psychiatrist, and Amy slept soundly through the night. The morning nurse woke her up and presented her with a “standard breakfast” menu card. “Fill this out quickly, so you don’t miss out on the hot breakfast. Otherwise, it’s just a cereal bar.” Again, the choices were limited. “Scrambled eggs – yes or no.” “Canadian bacon – yes or no.” “Wheat toast – yes or no.” “Butter – yes or no.” Strawberry jam or orange marmalade.” “Corn Flakes with milk – yes or no.” “Hot tea or decaf coffee.” Hungry, she circled everything, with a double circle around coffee, even though it was only decaf.
After breakfast, she was unceremoniously given her keys and bottle of medication, and released. Her car was parked at the police station and she had no shoes on, so she asked to use the phone to call her friend Sarah to ask for a ride. She told Sarah everything that had happened and asked if she would come back to the apartment with her, so she could shower and dress properly before heading back over to the station. Being the good friend that she is, Sarah said, “Of course. I am here for you, whatever you need.”
When they got back to the apartment, Amy noticed that everything felt normal and nothing seemed out of place. Her laptop and cell phone were sitting next to her purse on the table near the front door, untouched. She popped a pill, took a hot shower, and got dressed. She looked at the bed and the officers were right, there was nothing on it. There wasn’t a pile of clothes or a backpack, or anything that she could have mistaken for a body.
Sarah drove Amy to the police station, this time in shoes, jeans, and a baggy sweater. They both went in, sat down near the desk where a new woman had taken over for Nancy. “I’m here to see Officer Matthews,” Amy tells the woman.
“Officer Matthews is out on a call. You’ll have to wait.”
It must have been twenty minutes before Office Matthews returned and led Amy to the same room she was brought into the night before. “Coffee, Ms. Morgan?” he asked. “Yes, please, and not decaf, please, one cream, no sugar.” He leaves for a moment returning with a paper cup of steaming coffee, a single creamer, and a plastic stirrer. “The body found on Route 7 last night has been identified. Lacey Cahill, age 25. Ring a bell?”
“No, I don’t know her. I’ve never heard that name before. And, that’s just… awful.”
“Matthews, I need to speak to you for a moment,” a man’s voice called out from the hall.
“Lacey Cahill called 911 two nights ago. She reported seeing a man laying on her bed. Officers arrived on the scene to find the apartment empty and no signs of forcible entry. The scene was cleared. The report says that the officers suggested that Lacey find another place to stay for the night, but she declined.”
“Oh my god,” Matthews said out loud.
Dear Radhika,
This is my letter to you as a story that we pass on to the “ladies-to-be” on the eve of their eighteenth birthday. I hope your mother has done the same, while I, your grandmother, bless you through the stars.
This story is a testimony to how your great grandmother and the women before her never gave a second thought to question their assumed value and existence, which only belonged to the existence of their husbands, once they were married. I was directly involved in one of the scenes of this story and hence it is very close to me and all my daughters, granddaughters and great- granddaughter to come!
The narrator of this story is one of the protagonists of this concept of a female’s sole existence after marriage. I hope you get to know of it by the end.
Here goes the story-
I distinguish colors and white. I distinguish joy and mourning. I distinguish life and death.
“Abha, Abha! I need your assistance”, the Princess called out for Devi’s daughter, the newly hired maid, whom she loved getting her hair and makeover done by. Abha entered the scarlet net canopy and started helping the royal Indian Princess in her “Bath of Love”, before the honorable Prince could make it to his palace this afternoon after his magnificent victory over the opponent troops. The “Bath of Love” wasn’t just a bath, but it had everything to do in the world with the Princess’s desirable look, her majestic attire of scarlet and gold, and her tantalizing fragrance that would make the Prince want her in the night of love after their separation of months for this war he had just won.
Devi peeped into the room’s private chamber, not wanting to let the princess know she was there. With grief in her eyes, Abha concealed the Princess’s tan marks and face spots, just as she did conceal her gut-wrenching pain and mourn. “Hmm Hmmm Hmm Hmm…La La La…., Devi always wanted me to try deeper shades of maroon, as she knew my spouse-hood reflected more through it and Rana Ji loved shades of red on me. Being married feels great. I get my ornaments, I get my glow, I get my deep red dresses, I get my long hair decorated, I get my deep sweet fragrances, my anklets and their sounds, my lip and cheek colors, my kohl, my bangles, all from Rana ji’s being. And most important of all, do you know what I get from him, Abha? This deep red vermilion.”, she said, taking the small metal box containing me, in her palm and brought it close to her face, adoring her flushed and made-over face in the mirror, as she sat on her dressing chair after her rose-bath, and boldly done rose-lit makeup.
“What are we without our suhaag? Nothing in our own skin, all for the husband, all with the husband, nothing without him! Do you know, Abha, vermilion is the symbol of having a deep, beloved, longed for partnership, that we share with our husband. It stays in the partition of our hair until our husbands breathe.”, she said with a glint her eyes. “It just cannot be separated from a bride, a wife, a partner. It takes two days of customs, traditions, prayers, and sermons for a wife to get rid of this element of her marriage, in case of their spouse’s loss”, she said with a pause of rebel, yet dedication. “A widow carries pale and dull appearance, and no colors. But what do I have to do with it!”, she said in negligence and a sense of dislike.
“Look at you, you look so lonely and incomplete. Your pale yellow and pink dresses do not give you the deep red contentment that I know you crave for. Every girl needs a man to bring colors, togetherness and love into her life. Don’t worry, we will get you married soon! You will get to replace your pale bangles with those of maroon”, she said with a smile of pride and fulfillment.
“Where is Devi today? I haven’t seen her in two-three days, even you weren’t around until last night. I am so engrossed in Rana ji’s arrival and his thoughts and his love and his….”, she looks down in excitement and shyness, “I was just too occupied to think of anything, Rana ji is coming back after months, I love his courage and valor, and I can’t wait to meet him after his victory. I will surrender into his arms…, I mean… I just forgot that your mother and you were coming here for my makeover today as well, I was just waiting to see Rana ji!”, she said all in a breath and looked down with tears of contentment and joy rolling down her cheeks. “I want to meet Devi today and tell her how I feel Abha, call her inside. Let your mother come here and do my hair, she knows it well too, she has been doing it since I stepped into this palace first, she knows the folds of these braids, and the folds in my stomach that are occurring right now, I know she will relate, call her Abha, call your mother, call Devi.
Abha looked back in helplessness and spotted Devi behind the curtains of the chamber, and asked her to come in through her gestures. She retaliated, but couldn’t for long. As Devi took each step towards the princess, her heart pounded with every fear and disappointment that she shall bring to the Princess. “I will ask Rana ji to decorate this partition in my hair with this color of love”, she said, lifting the tiny box, my armor, again in her palm and looking at her blush-adorned face in the mirror. “Her Highness!”, the words escaped Devi’s dried dull lips. “Aaaaaaaaah!” Princess spotted the source of the voice in the mirror and threw a piercing voice of horror and disgust, through her deep red lips, turning around to the white-dressed figure!
What made you enter a married woman’s room decorated in suhaag? she said after a pause of moments in utter negligence and terror, trying to reflect her newly acquired disgust. “Abha, tell her how married women like me hate these people with pale blank faces and short hair and white sarees…tell her to leave and please purify my room as soon as possible!”, she shrieked with a voice of courage that hid the shock and fear she had just experienced. “Tell her never to come near me or my suhaag and never ever step in my and my husband’s room again,” she added.
Devi left the beautiful chamber, weeping, hiding her beautiful, yet “pale and featureless” face in her white draped saree and hiding from the world, her mere existence.
“Abha, why didn’t you tell me? Do not ever repeat this with me or any married woman in this palace, or should I say on this Earth!”, she said calming her expressions and voice.
“I think you should go and rest, this loss must have been difficult for you as well. Tell the other maidens to help me set up my room for Rana ji, and also purify this space.” “Yes, Her Highness!”, muttered Abha.
The royal Indian married Princess then carefully placed me on her mirror table with pride and waited for her husband for the next couple of hours, adorning the room with symbols of love and marriage, deep red shades all around.
“Nandini, Nandini!”, she woke up hearing her name from across the chamber, knowing it was her Rana ji, her love, her suhaag, as it was only him who was entitled to call the Princess by her name. She took me, sitting in the metal box, in her hands towards the entrance, with a face flushed with pride, joy, contentment and excitement. But as she approached the entrance, the voice turned thinner, and little had she known before that it was a feminine voice. She opened the curtains, disappointed in knowing it wasn’t her love whom she had been waiting for hours now!
“Who is it?” she enquired as she jerked the drapes around the pillar to find out one of the maids looking down, with heavy moist eyes, and then what she saw shook her soul.
“They betrayed us later, and we lost! We lost the battle, the kingdom and… and”, the maid said slowly bowing her head further, “…and him!”, she said advancing to Nandini, the tray in her hands that Nandini was eyeing all while this dialogue.
Nandini looked at the tray containing the white saree, pale water and hair razors, only to escape another, “Aaahhhhhhhh”, this time with pain, helplessness but no disgust.
She shrieked her soul out and dropped me to the ground, scattered all over the floor, giving to the golden tiles, the deep red color, that had just left Nandini’s life.
Nandini, shocked, hurt and terrified, was made to take her next step to cross me over to the other side.
I distinguish life and death. I distinguish joy and mourning. I distinguish colors and white. I am Vermilion.
I hope now you know who the narrator is, and understand what I wanted to deliver through this story.
Being the only first financially independent lady in my bloodline, I started speaking up for my values and existence, but until then, this taboo against widows and the concept to nullify the value of a female unless she is married and then only sustain it till she remains married, existed really dominantly, and hence, I want you to know as you turn into a grown-adult lady tomorrow, that never question your worth nor underestimate your existence in your own pretty brown skin.
You and every all the beautiful ladies in my bloodline need to know the history of this evil social practice and be proud of the fact that their ancestral lady fought against it, for them to have an equal and respectable life in our society and family today!
Always remember to be proud of what your marriage brings to you, but never associate your entire existence or value and association to it!
With love,
Granny
10 responses to “ESSAY (Weds)”
sand
The truth is that nothing really happened in Paris. Still, I lost things. Felt pieces of my life slip through my fingers like dry sand, and all I’m left with now is the shards that stuck to my skin. Really, it could have happened anywhere. But it happened in Paris.
There’s no good way to start this story because I don’t remember the exact moment I fell in love with her. I can tell you what it felt like: it felt like March. Like the bread we used to bake together and a flower made from newspaper clippings. Like red velvet and a leather jacket traded back and forth. It felt delicate, like a plate waiting to crack. But there was something broken about it from the very beginning. I knew from the start that there was no way to win.
I don’t need to describe her to you. You know she was beautiful. Tiringly so—by the end it was almost exhausting to look at her. I know I’m not the only one who felt this. Did you really think I was the only one who loved her? No. The whole world did.
Which is why—though I can’t tell you when I began to love her—I can tell you precisely the moment I started to hate her. Ironically, Paris started that, too. The summer before our last year of high school, she went to Europe with her father who was either a lawyer or ran a weed company—it was never really clear which one. The issue wasn’t that she was away. It was that she had been introduced to the real world, and the real world told her she was beautiful—better than other girls—and she believed it. Bathed herself in the praise like a dove languidly rolling in its birdbath, swallowing compliments like drugs, doling out bored sighs when someone spoke about something other than herself.
As hard as it was to be in love with her, stopping was the easiest thing in the world. The person I had loved simply didn’t exist anymore.
Now it’s June in Paris. Just friends, like we always had been. It’s us and our friend Rachel; there to bridge the gap between us. While we are hot-headed, easy to anger, Rachel is calm and sweet, the purest person I’ve ever met to this day. If sand was slipping through my fingers, Rachel was there, scooping it up and putting it back in my hands.
The first night, Rachel and I leave her sleeping in the apartment (tiny, bright green, and busy, above a bar in Montmartre called Les Innocents) and walk to get groceries, chatting trivially. I eat a nectarine as it starts to rain, hot and thick, pressing our hair to our foreheads. When we return home I am sticky; water and fruit juice dripping down my palms. Rachel and I find her with wet hair and a men’s t-shirt on. TEXAS, it reads, the biggest country in one state. We make a salad and split an eclair into three parts. She hasn’t said more than a few words to me since I got here and I know, somehow, that this trip is doomed before it’s even begun.
The next day is the start of a heat wave that chases us all the way until we’re on the plane back home. It’s stifling, almost dirty, the kind of heat that gets under your fingernails and fucks with your mind. The kind of heat that makes teenage girls hate each other, sitting silently at restaurants pettily sucking on straws and fighting about which metro stop was the right one. Worse, Paris is crowded this time of year, meaning you have to shoulder your way through the streets and train cars, a thousand trapped people breathing in unison. I had known both of them for years, and never had there been an absence of things to talk about. Now, silences followed us wherever we went. The heat made us strangers.
We learn to exist with each other in the night, when the air isn’t so oppressive and the streets clear out, allowing the entire city to ourselves. We wear black boots and wander in no particular direction, trying to find a bar that’s open—any at all. The one we settle at has an awning covered in fake ivy and no one’s there save the bartender. We irritate him by ordering three waters. I’m wearing a green crocheted dress and I feel like I probably look like a little girl. She sits to my right—applying her lipstick in the reflection of a spoon. She’s going on about the submarine that went missing off the coast of St. Johns and periodically checks her phone for updates from the New York Times. Rachel and I indulge her. None of us know that the submarine and all its inhabitants are already dead.
We sit outside with our waters, and soon after we arrive a second group sits down next to us. There’s a girl smoking a cigarette and three men, and the girl is talking enough for all four of them. They don’t seem to mind—nodding along cheerfully. The girl startles us by asking where we’re from. California, we answer, and she delights in this because she just returned from a trip to San Diego, where a man had asked her to marry him. She doesn’t tell us what she said, but she’s here in Paris—so. One of her friends leans over and whispers to her in French.
“He says you are the loveliest women in all of Paris,” she grins. Something curls in my stomach, an envy. A feeling that he’s talking to Rachel and her, not me. All of their eyes wander past me, and, yeah, I get it. She’s the kind of woman you write songs about. Believe me, I’ve written them. And I’m wearing a crocheted dress, green like our apartment walls, and I feel like a little girl.
The day after that one is the fête de la musique: the festival of music. The streets are swarmed with people and I’m wearing Rachel’s skirt. The girl from the night before had invited us to one of her friend’s venues, and we showed up with hopeful, bright faces. All three of us were in awe of the girl; all wanted to be her a bit, and thought that we would spend the rest of our night with her, but she leaves us quite alone five minutes after we meet up with her, and we’re forced to keep wandering, to the next venue and then the next. It’s dark out when we find a hidden alcove of dancing bodies, cornered away in an empty street, all bad outfits and worse music. Three stories above us, two young men hang out of their windowsill, smoking. I am pressed to Rachel, hot even though it’s the middle of the night, and my feet ache.
“What d’you think we have to do to get invited up there?” I shout, glancing up at the boys. It’s a joke, but she takes it seriously—has something to prove. I should’ve stayed quiet, for the minute she turns and makes eye contact with them, they beckon us up eagerly. Once we’ve climbed the stairs, however, it becomes abundantly clear that they won’t talk to us—don’t even offer us anything to drink. Liked the idea of having pretty girls in their apartment but didn’t know what to do about it when the time came. The music floats up through the window, and she sits on the ledge, holding Rachel’s hand and swaying silently. We haven’t talked today at all, really. There are lights that cast neon shadows over her face, dousing everything in a sickly yellow, and I realize that I want badly to go home. Not the apartment. Home, California.
The days following, I have a backache that chases me around the city. We walk everywhere, go everywhere, never allowing ourselves a chance to face the black mass of words that have piled onto our shoulders; things that are thought but not said. I haven’t been in love with her, not for a long time, and in Paris there is no before and after, there’s only here, and now, and I hate you so much I can hardly look at you.
Our flight home is at four in the morning on a Saturday, and Rachel suggests that we stay up until then—no reason to only get two hours of sleep. We go out dancing in red and black dresses in a jazz club that’s really more like a cave, with live music and swing dancers that looked like they’d been pulled out of the 1950s. It’s crowded, and we have to sit in the very back, on stairs that lead to a sealed-off tower, and everything is beautiful but also wrong. An Australian man is seated next to us, and when Rachel and I go off to dance he starts talking to her, accent so thick that when she recounts the story to her father on the car ride home, she says that she hadn’t understood a word he was saying. I need some air, I tell Rachel, and we step outside to let the wind wash over our skin. I light a cigarette—she hates cigarettes—but halfway through my second draw I feel sick, dizzy, and the neon sign glows like the devil in front of me.
“Put it out,” Rachel says gently, shoveling sand back into my pocket. “Put it out.” I do, and the ashes twinkle like stars on the concrete before I bring my foot down, and somewhere, I ignite a supernova. I’m sorry, I want to say.
Back in the bar she’s done with the Australian man, sipping on her drink and when she sees me she takes my hand. Leads me to the dance floor, and it’s like none of this ever happened. Spins me around and we’re in the theatre and it’s Halloween, and Tim Curry’s singing Rose Tint My World on the big screen. I’m Janet and she’s Rocky and Paris never existed in the first place. This is maybe the last time I’ll ever look at her and think she’s someone I could love again. We go home—California—and don’t speak. She goes to New York, and doesn’t say goodbye.
So, yes, I did lose her. Lost parts of myself, too, because for much of my life, loving her was me. And it’s possible, if you were to walk the streets of Paris for long enough, you’d find bits of sand, dusting the places where we began to fade.
BLOOD & WATER (REVISED)
It was an easy place to get lost in. Giant, cold – a stranger’s house on an overcast day. A wire fence that looked dangerous, an impossible amount of bright-colored plastic toys, grass too green for the summertime. Kids older than me chasing each other around, all muddy shins, tangled hair. Someone was grilling; everyone was drinking. I bounce on the bottom of a shallow, smooth pool. It is cool, and wonderful. The skirt of my swimsuit billows out in a small circle around me. I am five and round-bellied, look just like my father. I have no idea. In an instant, I slip underwater. Survival takes over, badly, and I flail my skinny arms, gasp for air. Men dive in in their three-piece suits to save me from five feet of water. I do not know where my parents are.
After this, I am put in swim lessons. Later, they tell me they assumed I knew how to swim, the way most children do. That it couldn’t have been more than five feet of water – that I must have just… panicked. The teacher is a brown-haired woman with wire-rimmed glasses and a hardworking face. She teaches me to swim, and like most things, I never become particularly great, just better. At nine I aged out of lessons and was put on “team.” Team did not compete, we were just the group they had little left to teach. I was the youngest one there by years, too small to use the adult equipment, too weak for most of the exercises. They tried to teach us about survival by pushing us in the deep end in our winter clothes, boots and all, asking us to swim up from the bottom. I almost couldn’t; struggled to the edge to hold myself up for air, fingertips gripping at slippery, blackening tiles. Another time, they strapped weights to our ankles and again, asked us to swim up. This time: I couldn’t do it. Someone with common sense would have pried the weights off their ankles, but I am not someone with common sense. I struggled and resolved myself to drowning, peacefully. The oldest girl in the class, Miranda, had to dive in to save me. Then, I thought Miranda was as old as I would ever be. She was probably sixteen, and could hold her breath for minutes at a time. I was never fully convinced she was real. Still, I loved the water. Even the year I worried there were dead people down there, who might wake up and drag me down, I loved it.
They enrolled my little brother in swim lessons too, the kind where toddlers bounce in the water with a parent and sing happy songs. They were hoping to escape the embarrassment of yet another drowned child, and they would. He hated the water. He’d claw his way up our mother until he clung to her curly head of hair, screaming. At the time, I made fun of him. I was always making fun of him. But he was terrified. I know why I did that, I just wish I didn’t. While he begged to return to the womb, my father and I poured over an outdated workbook – you know the kind, all penmanship, math, being Good. We’d sit in the back of the room, cross-legged on the perpetually wet carpet, flipping through page after page, the spiral-bound book balanced on a green rubbermaid tub full of chemicals. The air was too thick for my father to breathe, but I didn’t understand these things, then. Bodies, maybe. Fears. They were conquerable, inconsequential.
I had an aunt that lived what I considered the perfect life on Cape Cod. She was older, alone, and showed no sign of stopping. Her house was small and empty; I hoped that I, too, would one day live in a small, empty house that smelled of nothing in particular. Best of all, she shared a pool with the other people in her neighborhood. When you return to a place, over and over again, you develop rituals. We’d dive in, even though we weren’t supposed to. It was thrilling. We’d race to the other end of the pool. The first time I won, I was just small enough that things like being the fastest mattered, and praise stuck. I was something close to proud.
My father was six-foot-eight at the time, and like me, mostly legs. He’d stand in the deep end so we could swim loops around his ankles, count how many. I don’t remember the number anymore. If I had anything to say about it, it was an even one. Always in pairs, like Noah’s arc. He’d let us climb up and stand on his shoulders to dive into the water. Me, my brother. Once, my cousins. Strangers, even. I don’t know why. He looked like exactly the kind of person I would never trust a child with, but everyone loved him. Dangerous faces, us. Always getting away with things. But, I suppose he had calm eyes. Used to be a teacher. So there, at the pool, people would loan their children off to swim with us, a tiny school of fish, a giant.
People like me can’t really afford rituals. I get that from him, too. There is no threshold to obsession, we begin there. Every time we left, flips backwards and forwards, crawling along the bottom of the deep end, spinning like a barrel, handstands, different types of dive, swimming from front to back. The way he taught me to empty my lungs, slow my heart, and sink to the bottom. Because it could be the last time. Either my last time as a child… or just the last. And at some point, it was. I am my mother, now. The water is always too cold. I am probably too weak to swim now. My limbs have atrophied, my lungs always let me down.
He keeps going, though. He still hoists us up to his shoulders when we are far too big and they are far too destroyed. Three shoulder replacements and they never took. We will have that in common, one day. His arms don’t work, and still, he is faster than me. His heart fails, and still he is faster than me. The summer he breaks his neck, he cannot right himself in the pool. We joke he’s like a turtle on his back. My brother watches to make sure he doesn’t get stuck on his stomach, facedown in the water. In swim class, this is called the dead man’s float. We dive in together for the last time and I win and it is devastating. Reality unravels and suddenly he is deteriorating all at once, in real and rapid time. He is dying before my eyes. Everyone is. Why did I have to try?
Today, the doctors are always telling me to swim. There is no treatment for living the kind of life I do, so this is not a solution, just another thing to ask me to do instead of helping me, because the science hasn’t caught up to our bodies, yet. Always, water. Drink it until you drown. Swim until you prune away. Become water and drain yourself from our lives, return to the sea, devolve, evaporate from our world.
There’s a girl across the table not much older than me, listening to my father list out his life and manipulating my hand. Open, close, open, close. His heart was failing quietly for the past few years, and now he’s more scar tissue than soul. His spine has been fused because our bones disintegrate. He can’t feel his legs, at least a handful of his organs don’t work on their own, there isn’t a joint in his body that hasn’t been operated on. We get all the rarest cancers. The cause of it all is one in a million. I feel a tendon I didn’t know was there snap.
Last summer’s doctor sees us in the halls and asks how I’ve been feeling, so I fix my limp and don’t answer her. These people are used to making everyone better. Sometimes I wonder if that’s why no one will believe us: our truth is impossible to live with. We won’t get better, and we won’t die fast enough. We cannot be fixed; we will not feel better soon. We are not what was promised.
Sometime in the fall, we are each taking twenty-eight different pills. Some of them are the same, and we keep mine when I switch over for when we inevitably run out. Our bodies have broken down in the same ways; the only difference, really, is the speed. In some ways, it’s good to have grown up with him. I have seen the incisions on a spine split open and repaired them. I have seen blood pool under the skin of an entire torso. I was four when I learned to fill syringes with insulin, to measure and tap and push. I have treated more wounds, seen the inside of more surgical units, been next door to dozens of people as they died. I have grown so bored with near-death that I’ve learned to ask when I answer calls whether or not something is survivable. I have seen so much blood.
He was so angry when I was growing up. I always thought he was just a bad person. It has taken almost twenty years for me to understand that it wasn’t just this: that he, like me – that I, like him – am just a person who is in pain. That just as we have the same bodies, we have the same brains, and that science hasn’t figured out how to numb either of these things, yet. He lays in the sun and imagines himself out of his body. I take medicine after medicine and am angry, again. And I wait for another fifty years of living with this body, and this brain, and this person.
The doctor, again, tells us to swim. I tell them the last time they dissected my father, they asked $600 for thirty minutes in a public pool, one specialist to thirty people. I don’t tell them that sometimes, it is too expensive for us to survive intact. We are quiet on the drive home, return to our small lives: everything is medication, holding ourselves together, staring at the ceiling until things are different. Water, water, water. We are unstable and cruel and we are still alive. After all this time, we are beginning to understand each other, again.
Everything aches.
Spinach Fettuccine Alfredo
After my parents divorced and before my father took his own life, he got an apartment on the top floor of an old building. It wasn’t the worst part of town, but it was far from the best. The kitchen was simple and outdated, yet it was where he got to be his best self. A machinist by day, he was also a talented cook. In this kitchen, he made spinach fettuccine Alfredo from scratch, hanging the green strands of pasta anywhere and everywhere to dry. Before buffalo wings were a thing, he fried split chicken wings in his countertop wok and served them lightly smothered in buttered hot sauce, but on this day, he came home from work, opened a can of Progresso lentil soup and heated it up in a pan on top of the oven. “MMmmm,” he said out loud after taking the first warm bite and thought to himself, “Maybe I can do this.” His marriage was dead, but he wasn’t – not yet anyway.
In this apartment, I saw my father in a way I never got to see before. He kept the place spotless. He had a hip fashion sense and meticulously cared for his clothing. He had surprisingly good taste in TV shows, movies, and music which he recorded onto blank tapes with handwritten labels that he displayed on a bookshelf in alphabetical order. He had beautiful handwriting. He was fancy! He drank Corona beer with a slice of lime pushed through the opening and Dr. Pepper heated up and garnished with a floating orange slice.
I remember sitting on the couch in that apartment watching episodes of “The Simpsons” while holding hands with my dad after he served us thoughtful and delicious meals of spinach salads or buttery cajun shrimp and rice. It was neat and tidy all around us. I felt safe, loved, and cared for.
I remember finding out that my mother eloped while I was in this apartment. We got a call from her late one Saturday night, “Do you remember Eddie?” a man that had given us a ride home from the grocery store the previous week. Eddie was a drummer she met two weeks prior at the bar where she worked. My home with my mother never felt safe after that, and one day, she called my Dad to tell him that I would need to move in with him. He ended his life a couple of days later in a park downtown.
The Morning Routine
By Tess Marini-Rapoport
43 minutes. 43 minutes is how long it takes me to transform myself. I feel my weightless body press against my silky, white sheets. The room is dim, but the windows are warmly lit and every morning, make the dresser appear as a shadow. It looks large in front of my bed, like a mountain daring you to climb it. I’ve always thought it was just the shadows of the trees outside. Letting out a sigh, I feel my feet effortlessly graze the floor, landing gently onto it. Dancing in the bedroom, I raise my lace shirt over my arms, watching it elegantly float to the ground.
20 minutes before I leave. 20 minutes before I have to see the most influential, yet somehow insignificant people in my life. I pace over to the mountain, sliding the drawers open. I drag on the tightest, skinniest jeans I can find. They scrunch around all the curves in my body. I pull on the slimmest long sleeve cropped top, tugging away the fabric in discomfort. I think to myself, “I should change.” The fabric is clinging to my arms, clenching around my body, but I have to remind myself what they will all see. The most beautiful slim figure that enters the room and is sure to turn eyes.
Next up, my dirty blonde hair becomes pin straight. I grab the hot pink beauty blender next to me, viciously dabbing my face with concealer, foundation, anything I can get to cover up, really. My eyelashes become extended and curled. One time my friend told me that I had long eyelashes, so I need to keep up that appearance. My eyelids become painted with a gold shimmer. I catch a glimpse of the shine as I look to my side and I can’t help but smile. They are going to love this.
My light pink lips become a dark, striking cherry red. I can feel my stomach grumbling, but I don’t have time to worry about hunger when the people that pass me in the hallway don’t see me internally. A thought passes my mind, becoming all I can think about. One time, I was sitting with my friends, a group of about 10 people, after school outside of Toms, an old roadside shack. It is off the side of the road of a long, busy street surrounded by trees. The cars go so fast that they almost miss it. I had ordered some fries because I wasn’t sure I was hungry. Some friends ordered a lot of food, while some just ate from other’s meals. Assuming that was the norm, I offered the group some of my fries. I said, “There’s too many, if anyone wants some, you can have it”. One of the guys said, “You can’t eat sixteen fries?” another girl chimed in, “She’s so skinny she can’t even eat sixteen fries.” In utter shock, sitting on the picnic table, feeling the breeze hit my back, I looked around and not a single friend said anything. The fullness filled my stomach and the fries went straight to the trash. This is why I am here for the tenth time this morning fixing my hair to obtain perfection, ignoring my resentful stomach.
I grab my signature black eyeliner from my vanity. While most people would paint a thin line on their eyelid, I draw not only the thickest black mark above my eye, but also far below my eye, giving it a highly attractive and unique appearance, sure to draw attention. Maybe this is the only way to rebel.
I look at the clock. Only 5 minutes left. I sprint down the stairs and grab the tallest black heels I can find, aiming to appear taller. I remember one time I was walking in the middle school hallway with a guy in my grade. He told me that I wasn’t tall enough. “You blend right in”, he said.
Walking into the kitchen, I shake off everything. The hunger, the thoughts, the scrunching fabric around my arms. I pour a little bit of coffee and take one cookie. Because I know that will be all I have to eat today.
“Honey come down, something’s wrong with him!” my mom called. I ran down as quickly as I could. I could hear the thuds from my feet stomping on the wooden stairs. The railings leaned as I bore my weight against them. My feet slid on the wooden floor as I tried to sprint. My heart was pounding, and my vision blurred. What happened? I thought to myself. I was running so fast that I could’ve fallen. But surprisingly, I didn’t. I then approached the cream tile floors and saw Rover. He was frail, and lying on the ground. His fur almost blended in with the tiles. He lifted his head to look at me. His eyes drooped to a point where I could see the pain and suffering in his eyes. My cat was sitting by his head. My mom was sitting on the ground by his feet petting him. She never sits on the ground like that, I know it hurts her knee. “It’s ok honey,” she said to him. I came running over and sat down next to him.
“Mom, what happened?” I asked.
“Honey I tried taking Rover for a walk. He couldn’t even stand up.”
“Well, what’s the plan?” I asked. “Could we take him to the vet?”
“ Ellington Animal Clinic is closed, so he can’t see Dr. Prichard. I’ll try calling Bolton.”
My mom dialed the number. Rover coughed, a hoarse troubled cough. He couldn’t breathe properly in those moments he coughed. I kept stroking his head. “It’s ok, you’ll be ok.”
“They can’t take him.” My mom said as she hung up the call. “I’ll call Middletown, he was supposed to go there anyway to see the oncologist.”
My mom dialed the number again. After moments of Rover coughing and me stroking his head, my mom hung up.
“They can take him. I’ll call your sibling and we’ll get Rover in the car right now.”
My mom painfully stood up. She looked down at him while I stayed sitting down beside him. The cat came up to him and nudged his head. The cat must’ve been trying to reassure him, or say goodbye.
My dad came with our other dog, Booger. Booger looked at Rover for a good minute before running upstairs. My dad said he was upset and anxious, and I believe him. Booger always had separation anxiety from Rover.
My sibling, Aswini, came down the stairs. His eyes widened and he frowned the second he saw Rover. My mom updated Aswini as he was setting up the car. Aswini then lifted Rover and placed him in the car. He then sat in the driver’s seat, and my mom sat in the passenger seat. I sat in the back with Rover. We both were sitting on a red blanket, and there were plastic bags stuffed into the pockets inside the doors of the car. We knew how car-sick he would usually get. I stared at the GPS in the car. Our destination was 51 minutes away. That’s almost an hour. I thought. What if it’s too late?
I tried calming myself down. As Rover was coughing, I was leaning over and petting his head. “You’ll be ok, it’ll be ok Rover” I kept repeating. I tried looking out the window and listening to music. But the only music I could stand listening to was sad. Tears started rolling
down my face. I tried wiping them with my hand the best I could. Don’t cry, I thought. If he sees you cry, he’s gonna be sad. My mom and my sibling were silent. It was surprising since they would usually argue and scream back and forth when either one of them was driving. Trees kept blending in with each other. The road looked distorted. And the sun was out. I hated the sun being out, I thought. It should be raining, not sunny.
We finally reached the vet. My mom, Aswini, and I jumped out of the car to get Rover. Rover tried to use all of his strength to stand on all fours, but the second he tried to move, he wobbled vigorously. Aswini picked him up and while carrying him, I rushed to the door to open it for them. The Vet tech was standing in the lobby. They took Rover in their arms, said that the doctor was going to call my mom, and brought Rover to one of the exam rooms. My mom, Aswini, and I plopped down on the bench in the lobby. Seconds felt like minutes which felt like hours. I pulled out my headphones and tried to distract myself. But again, I couldn’t. Tears started rolling down my face under my mask. I rested my head on my mom’s shoulder. Thank god she didn’t see me cry. Aswini did though.
After what felt like an eternity later, my mom’s phone rang. She immediately picked it up and walked outside. Aswini and I stayed on the bench, watching her through the window as she conversed with the doctor. I tried my best to notice her expression. Did it look like she was screaming at the doctor? Was she smiling? Was she making any big gestures? I couldn’t tell what was happening, and I don’t think Aswini could either. This call was taking a while. It had been 10 minutes, and she was still talking. Aswini got up and headed for the doors. I got up and followed him. We walked down the stairs and up a path towards my mom on the phone.
“Mhm, mhm,” she said at first. I thought the doctor had a lot of information, and that Rover was going to need a lot of treatment, but that wasn’t true.
“Can I just have five minutes please?” my mom said as her voice started breaking. Is it that bad? I thought. My mom never cries, like ever.
My mom hung up. Tears started rolling down her face as she shook her head. Aswini hugged her and then burst into tears. I, of course, was crying too.
“He’s going to be euthanized,” my mom said while sniffling. “There’s fluid in his heart that can’t be diffused.”
My stomach dropped and my chest pounded. I couldn’t breathe with my mask on, so I took it off. It was covered in snot and tears. This couldn’t be it, I thought. I would no longer embrace his hugs as he would rest his paws on my shoulders. I would no longer have my arm scratched by him pulling it closer for more cuddles. An image flashed in my mind. This image was an image of Rover as a puppy when I first met him. My mom kept him on her lap for me to see. He came up to me and licked my face immediately. That moment had always made me happy whenever I’d think about it. But now, it makes me cry.
He won’t see me when I’m in college, I thought. He won’t see me grow up as an adult. How am I going to navigate life without him?
It has now been a year and a half since Rover passed. People have always asked me how I navigate life without him. But the truth is, I don’t because he hasn’t left us. I see him in the sunsets he paints whenever I come home or when Booger got discharged from the hospital after his surgery. I see him in the wind as it blows the tears away from my face when I cry. I see him in the clouds shaped just like him. Sure he may not physically be here. But I know that he will always be with me, and watch over me no matter what.
Title: He Will Always be With Me
Frozen Moments of Laughter
When I am faced with the possibility of death, I do the most inappropriate thing thinkable: I laugh. Let me tell you how I discovered this random piece of information about myself.
It is a day before Christmas Eve that my roommate, Franka, and I decide to drive to the farther Walmart. It is less our generous nature rather than the fact that we are the only ones with a car out of our nine housemates. We shovel, shovel, shovel until we can see our car’s wheels. I push, push, push and Franka steps on the gas until the car finally moves.
“It is a bit windy,” she says clutching the stirring wheel with a force that makes her knuckles turn white.
We stop at a Tim Horton’s drive-through to get two large mochas. Legs crossed, phone in one hand and the red paper cup in the other, we sing along to some 90’s tunes. We live very secluded in the Rocky Mountains so the next Walmart is far, about two hours from us. We are on the road.
“It is a bit icy,” Franka says leaning forward as if she has a better view from closer to the steering wheel.
I change the song and she relaxes. 90 km/h on one of the most scenic roads I have ever seen in my life. The high mountains scraping the sky make me feel very small.
“It is a bit slippery on the highway,” Franka says. Her voice is just a whisper.
We leave the thick forest behind and find ourselves on a bridge. The frozen river beneath is covered in a fresh layer of snow and barely distinguishable from the shore. Franka adjusts her grip on the steering wheel, her whole body alert. Her fear almost tangible. That is when I feel the strong gush of wind tearing at our car. We start swiveling. I say her name – Franka, Franka, Franka. Do you know what you shouldn’t do when you lose control of the car on an icy road driving 90 km/h? You should under no circumstances hit the breaks. Franka does. I blink and we turn. I see cars coming towards us. I blink and we turn. I see the lake rushing towards us, too fast. I blink and we turn, turn, turn. We come to an abrupt halt. I don’t remember how exactly we get there. I am not even sure I really saw all those things. I look at Franka who lifts her hands in the air as if the steering wheel has burned her. I see tears rolling down her cheeks, dropping down into her lap.
That is the moment I start laughing. I put the car into park and look at the cars coming towards us at a speed that promises to make this accident into a spear fight with only one survivor. I am still laughing. We can’t get out of the car because we are literally on thin ice. I have to do something. Where is my phone? Where is my phone? Where is my phone? I have to call for help. I must have dropped it. Thoughts enter and leave my mind so fast I can’t hold on to a single one of them. Where did the music go? Is Franka hurt? I lean through the gap between the front seats. A book, a single glove, a fork. Where is my phone? I am still laughing. Tears prick my eyes. There is a knock on my window. I roll it down. The man scans Franka’s face, her hands still in the air and tears streaming down her face. He turns to me.
“We called an ambulance,” he pauses and glances at Franka. “You both still look beautiful,” he adds. What an odd thing to say, I think. My laughter turns into a sobby giggle.
“You can’t stay here. Let’s see if you can turn on the car.” He looks at Franka who vehemently shakes her head. I lean over the middle console and turn the key in the ignition. The car springs to life.
“Step lightly on the gas and we’ll push. You just have to move a few feet to be back on safe terrain,” he orders. I don’t know who ‘we’ is.
I turn to Franka whose eyes are already red-rimmed. She looks at me and shakes her head again. The tears have stopped but her hands remain in the air. “I can’t. I can’t. I can’t,” she repeats. “Can you do it?”
“You can,” I answer. I don’t want to admit it but I am scared. My hands are shaking. “It’s okay,” I say more for my sake than hers but she puts her hands back on the steering wheel. The rest becomes a blurred memory. I still laugh when someone hands me a big chunk of our car that I throw in the trunk.
Sometimes I think about the accident. Sometimes I tell strangers about the accident. I laugh and they laugh with me. Sometimes people don’t believe me when I tell them that when I am faced with the possibility of death, I laugh fear in the face.
Mirroring Timelines
My mother and I looked at each others’ reflections. Her gorgeous dark curls hung loosely around her hunched shoulders, and with tired eyes, she scanned herself in the mirror – her curves and scars, even the stubborn stretch marks, all those little details she never missed, but made her the gorgeous being she is. Marks highlighting all the battles she fought to bring two daughters to life; and all the nights she spent without sleeping, tending to their needs. With gloomy eyes that were once radiant, she scrutinized every inch of her feebly firm figure until they met mine. She half-smiled. At that moment, I heard all the screams and cries of the life she left behind – a girl, barely a woman yet, robbed of her 20s and married off at 19. I heard her muffled cries, and tear-stained pillows when her support system collapsed as friends she held dear, deliberately drifted apart. She stretched and tried and tired herself juggling between starting a family and pursuing a degree. I heard her bend and break as she bled life force into me. Suddenly, the girl in her was buried alive as she was reborn as a mother. And I also heard, the laughter and joys of the life she then embraced; the songs she hummed to lure me to sleep; her squeals as I took my very first step, the tears of pride she shed on my first day of school and my last. She didn’t even utter a word and I heard her.
I broke the trance, almost scared to disrupt the deafening silence, as I whispered in a shaky voice, “Thank you, Ma.”
She gazed at me with no emotions this time. A second passed, and then another. An unfamiliar emotion sparked in her eyes as she stared right through me, stripping me bare. She looked at me – like really looked at me. I stood there feeling naked amidst the layers of clothing covering me. I wrapped my hands around myself feeling more conscious than ever. Averting my gaze I saw myself in the mirror, fidgeting with the hem of my shirt with flushed cheeks, and curious eyes, full of life but too shy to meet hers. She looked at me through the mirror and in front of her, I was an untouched porcelain doll; not one scratch. In my eyes, she was the art of Kintsugi – broken but beautiful with all her scars of gold. She smiled a melancholic smile as she saw herself in me. At least all of her that once was.
She has that rare mental health condition in which a person thinks they see dead bodies, but they never really are dead bodies. She’ll see, out of the corner of her eye, a dark shape, and her mind thinks “dead body,” but it’s always just a log or a trash bag. When driving, she used to pull over and check to make sure, never finding anything. It happened so often, she eventually stopped checking. On her drive home from work today, she thought she saw one, this time appearing to be a body wrapped in plastic laying off the side of the road. “Just a sheet of plastic playing a trick on me,” she thought to herself as she kept driving. “I’m finally getting a grip on this,” she proudly thought to herself. “My therapist will be so proud of me.”
When she got home, she turned on the TV for background noise as she undressed in the kitchen. She tossed her dirty clothes into the washer, pulled her comfortable house pants out of the dryer, and slipped into them. She pulled her house shirt out of the dryer, and she heard, “Dead body found on Route 7.” She stood there frozen with her shirt above her head, as years of therapy melted off her half-naked body. Her eyes scanned the apartment for dead bodies, which only moments before she would have known was an unreasonable thing to do. Her eyes stopped on the half-open bedroom door. It was dark, but she could make out a figure lying on the bed. She closed her eyes, took deep breaths, and counted to five. She opened her eyes, and the figure was still there.
As quickly as she could, she pulled down her shirt, grabbed her keys, and ran barefoot out of the apartment. She lived in a small one-bedroom upstairs from a larger family unit, but the family who lived there was not home. She ran down the stairs and outside to the driveway. She got into her car and started to drive. It was fall, the evening temperature was dropping, and here she was in her house clothes with no jacket, no bra, no underwear, and no shoes. She drove the five or so minutes to the small city’s police department. She sat in her car, slowing -but not entirely successfully- regaining her grip.
A loud knock on the window brought her back into reality. “Are you okay?,” asked a police officer as he winds his fist in the universal symbol to roll down the window. “I… I… I don’t know. I think someone may be in my apartment,” she answered. “Okay, ma’am, I’m Officer Matthews. What is your name?,” he said. “Amy Morgan. I live at 44 Dawes Ave. in the upstairs apartment.”
“Okay, let’s get you inside, fill out a report, and we’ll get some officers over there to check it out.”
Officer Matthews walked Amy inside the station, leaving her with Nancy, the female desk agent who led her to a warm room, wrapped her in a blanket, and made her a cup of hot tea. She even found a pair of slipper socks, of the hospital-issued variety, to give to her. Matthews poked his head in to check on her. “Okay, Ms. Morgan. We are heading over to the apartment now and will be back shortly. If you need anything, let Nancy know.”
“I… I need my anxiety medication. It’s in the medicine cabinet. Please bring it back for me,” she replied as she looked around to make sure she didn’t see anything resembling a body. She didn’t. The brightly lit room was bare save for a table, four wooden chairs, and a large mirror hung on the wall.
Matthews and his partner got in their cruiser, turned on the lights, and drove over to Dawes Ave. The downstairs family was just returning from the sons’ soccer game. Mr. and Mrs. Amuso sent the boys inside and greeted the officers who explained the situation. Mrs. Amuso ran into the house to be with the boys and Mr. Amuso waited on the porch as the officers climbed the stairs. The door to Amy’s apartment was open. “Police!,” yelled the officers. Guns engaged, the two scope out the place. “Clear!” “Clear!” “Clear!” “Clear!” There was no-one there. There was no one and nothing on the neatly made bed. There was no sign of forcible entry and no sign of trespassing. They turned off the TV which was still on, grabbed the bottle of medication, locked up, assured the now uneasy Amuso family that the coast was clear, and headed on back to the station.
Upon their return, Matthews sat down across from Amy and slid the bottle of medication over to her. She opened the bottle, took a pill, and washed it down with the now cold tea. “I heard on the TV that there was a dead body found. Was there a dead body found just outside of town on Route 7, wrapped in plastic? Is this true?,” she asked. The officers looked at each other with a knowing look. The exact location of the body, and the fact that it had been wrapped in plastic, were pieces of information that had not been released to the public. “A body was found, yes.” Matthews replied. “What makes you think it was wrapped in plastic?”
“Because I saw it.”
“You saw it? Why didn’t you call 911?”
“Because… I… I see things…that aren’t there. I thought it wasn’t real. That’s what these pills are for.”
“That explains what she saw, or didn’t see, in her apartment,” Matthews said to his partner, who made the note on the report.
“Look,” Amy explained, “I don’t hallucinate. I see things that are there, but… I think they are things that they aren’t… like dead bodies. My mind plays tricks on me. I saw something on my bed tonight, I know I did. I just don’t know what.” The two offers looked at each other with an understanding.
Upon the officer’s insistence, Amy checked herself in for an overnight at the local mental health crisis care facility. It was better than going home, plus she wondered if she really was losing her grip. It was a Friday night, so she didn’t have to worry about taking the next day off from work, which was good because she promised to return to the station the next day to answer more questions.
When she got to the facility, it was late, and she hadn’t eaten since noon. The cafeteria was closed, but there was a “late-night” menu card, from which late check-ins could order a meal. The choices were limited, “turkey or tuna on wheat.” She circled tuna, add lettuce, add tomato, and hold the cheese. “Strawberry or lime jello.” She circled strawberry even though she knew she wouldn’t eat it.
When the tray arrived, she lifted the hospital-grade cloche to reveal a plate with a scoop of tuna in a plastic cup, two slices of bread, a leaf of lettuce, a slice of tomato, and a jello cup that just said “red” on the foil lid. There was a salt and pepper packet, and the only utensil was a plastic spoon, which was fine with her. She assembled her sandwich, and took a bite. “Surprisingly, not bad,” she thought as she finally started to feel like herself again.
The nurse administered a sedative that was prescribed by the on-call psychiatrist, and Amy slept soundly through the night. The morning nurse woke her up and presented her with a “standard breakfast” menu card. “Fill this out quickly, so you don’t miss out on the hot breakfast. Otherwise, it’s just a cereal bar.” Again, the choices were limited. “Scrambled eggs – yes or no.” “Canadian bacon – yes or no.” “Wheat toast – yes or no.” “Butter – yes or no.” Strawberry jam or orange marmalade.” “Corn Flakes with milk – yes or no.” “Hot tea or decaf coffee.” Hungry, she circled everything, with a double circle around coffee, even though it was only decaf.
After breakfast, she was unceremoniously given her keys and bottle of medication, and released. Her car was parked at the police station and she had no shoes on, so she asked to use the phone to call her friend Sarah to ask for a ride. She told Sarah everything that had happened and asked if she would come back to the apartment with her, so she could shower and dress properly before heading back over to the station. Being the good friend that she is, Sarah said, “Of course. I am here for you, whatever you need.”
When they got back to the apartment, Amy noticed that everything felt normal and nothing seemed out of place. Her laptop and cell phone were sitting next to her purse on the table near the front door, untouched. She popped a pill, took a hot shower, and got dressed. She looked at the bed and the officers were right, there was nothing on it. There wasn’t a pile of clothes or a backpack, or anything that she could have mistaken for a body.
Sarah drove Amy to the police station, this time in shoes, jeans, and a baggy sweater. They both went in, sat down near the desk where a new woman had taken over for Nancy. “I’m here to see Officer Matthews,” Amy tells the woman.
“Officer Matthews is out on a call. You’ll have to wait.”
It must have been twenty minutes before Office Matthews returned and led Amy to the same room she was brought into the night before. “Coffee, Ms. Morgan?” he asked. “Yes, please, and not decaf, please, one cream, no sugar.” He leaves for a moment returning with a paper cup of steaming coffee, a single creamer, and a plastic stirrer. “The body found on Route 7 last night has been identified. Lacey Cahill, age 25. Ring a bell?”
“No, I don’t know her. I’ve never heard that name before. And, that’s just… awful.”
“Matthews, I need to speak to you for a moment,” a man’s voice called out from the hall.
“Lacey Cahill called 911 two nights ago. She reported seeing a man laying on her bed. Officers arrived on the scene to find the apartment empty and no signs of forcible entry. The scene was cleared. The report says that the officers suggested that Lacey find another place to stay for the night, but she declined.”
“Oh my god,” Matthews said out loud.
Vermilion
Dear Radhika,
This is my letter to you as a story that we pass on to the “ladies-to-be” on the eve of their eighteenth birthday. I hope your mother has done the same, while I, your grandmother, bless you through the stars.
This story is a testimony to how your great grandmother and the women before her never gave a second thought to question their assumed value and existence, which only belonged to the existence of their husbands, once they were married. I was directly involved in one of the scenes of this story and hence it is very close to me and all my daughters, granddaughters and great- granddaughter to come!
The narrator of this story is one of the protagonists of this concept of a female’s sole existence after marriage. I hope you get to know of it by the end.
Here goes the story-
I distinguish colors and white. I distinguish joy and mourning. I distinguish life and death.
“Abha, Abha! I need your assistance”, the Princess called out for Devi’s daughter, the newly hired maid, whom she loved getting her hair and makeover done by. Abha entered the scarlet net canopy and started helping the royal Indian Princess in her “Bath of Love”, before the honorable Prince could make it to his palace this afternoon after his magnificent victory over the opponent troops. The “Bath of Love” wasn’t just a bath, but it had everything to do in the world with the Princess’s desirable look, her majestic attire of scarlet and gold, and her tantalizing fragrance that would make the Prince want her in the night of love after their separation of months for this war he had just won.
Devi peeped into the room’s private chamber, not wanting to let the princess know she was there. With grief in her eyes, Abha concealed the Princess’s tan marks and face spots, just as she did conceal her gut-wrenching pain and mourn. “Hmm Hmmm Hmm Hmm…La La La…., Devi always wanted me to try deeper shades of maroon, as she knew my spouse-hood reflected more through it and Rana Ji loved shades of red on me. Being married feels great. I get my ornaments, I get my glow, I get my deep red dresses, I get my long hair decorated, I get my deep sweet fragrances, my anklets and their sounds, my lip and cheek colors, my kohl, my bangles, all from Rana ji’s being. And most important of all, do you know what I get from him, Abha? This deep red vermilion.”, she said, taking the small metal box containing me, in her palm and brought it close to her face, adoring her flushed and made-over face in the mirror, as she sat on her dressing chair after her rose-bath, and boldly done rose-lit makeup.
“What are we without our suhaag? Nothing in our own skin, all for the husband, all with the husband, nothing without him! Do you know, Abha, vermilion is the symbol of having a deep, beloved, longed for partnership, that we share with our husband. It stays in the partition of our hair until our husbands breathe.”, she said with a glint her eyes. “It just cannot be separated from a bride, a wife, a partner. It takes two days of customs, traditions, prayers, and sermons for a wife to get rid of this element of her marriage, in case of their spouse’s loss”, she said with a pause of rebel, yet dedication. “A widow carries pale and dull appearance, and no colors. But what do I have to do with it!”, she said in negligence and a sense of dislike.
“Look at you, you look so lonely and incomplete. Your pale yellow and pink dresses do not give you the deep red contentment that I know you crave for. Every girl needs a man to bring colors, togetherness and love into her life. Don’t worry, we will get you married soon! You will get to replace your pale bangles with those of maroon”, she said with a smile of pride and fulfillment.
“Where is Devi today? I haven’t seen her in two-three days, even you weren’t around until last night. I am so engrossed in Rana ji’s arrival and his thoughts and his love and his….”, she looks down in excitement and shyness, “I was just too occupied to think of anything, Rana ji is coming back after months, I love his courage and valor, and I can’t wait to meet him after his victory. I will surrender into his arms…, I mean… I just forgot that your mother and you were coming here for my makeover today as well, I was just waiting to see Rana ji!”, she said all in a breath and looked down with tears of contentment and joy rolling down her cheeks. “I want to meet Devi today and tell her how I feel Abha, call her inside. Let your mother come here and do my hair, she knows it well too, she has been doing it since I stepped into this palace first, she knows the folds of these braids, and the folds in my stomach that are occurring right now, I know she will relate, call her Abha, call your mother, call Devi.
Abha looked back in helplessness and spotted Devi behind the curtains of the chamber, and asked her to come in through her gestures. She retaliated, but couldn’t for long. As Devi took each step towards the princess, her heart pounded with every fear and disappointment that she shall bring to the Princess. “I will ask Rana ji to decorate this partition in my hair with this color of love”, she said, lifting the tiny box, my armor, again in her palm and looking at her blush-adorned face in the mirror. “Her Highness!”, the words escaped Devi’s dried dull lips. “Aaaaaaaaah!” Princess spotted the source of the voice in the mirror and threw a piercing voice of horror and disgust, through her deep red lips, turning around to the white-dressed figure!
What made you enter a married woman’s room decorated in suhaag? she said after a pause of moments in utter negligence and terror, trying to reflect her newly acquired disgust. “Abha, tell her how married women like me hate these people with pale blank faces and short hair and white sarees…tell her to leave and please purify my room as soon as possible!”, she shrieked with a voice of courage that hid the shock and fear she had just experienced. “Tell her never to come near me or my suhaag and never ever step in my and my husband’s room again,” she added.
Devi left the beautiful chamber, weeping, hiding her beautiful, yet “pale and featureless” face in her white draped saree and hiding from the world, her mere existence.
“Abha, why didn’t you tell me? Do not ever repeat this with me or any married woman in this palace, or should I say on this Earth!”, she said calming her expressions and voice.
“I think you should go and rest, this loss must have been difficult for you as well. Tell the other maidens to help me set up my room for Rana ji, and also purify this space.” “Yes, Her Highness!”, muttered Abha.
The royal Indian married Princess then carefully placed me on her mirror table with pride and waited for her husband for the next couple of hours, adorning the room with symbols of love and marriage, deep red shades all around.
“Nandini, Nandini!”, she woke up hearing her name from across the chamber, knowing it was her Rana ji, her love, her suhaag, as it was only him who was entitled to call the Princess by her name. She took me, sitting in the metal box, in her hands towards the entrance, with a face flushed with pride, joy, contentment and excitement. But as she approached the entrance, the voice turned thinner, and little had she known before that it was a feminine voice. She opened the curtains, disappointed in knowing it wasn’t her love whom she had been waiting for hours now!
“Who is it?” she enquired as she jerked the drapes around the pillar to find out one of the maids looking down, with heavy moist eyes, and then what she saw shook her soul.
“They betrayed us later, and we lost! We lost the battle, the kingdom and… and”, the maid said slowly bowing her head further, “…and him!”, she said advancing to Nandini, the tray in her hands that Nandini was eyeing all while this dialogue.
Nandini looked at the tray containing the white saree, pale water and hair razors, only to escape another, “Aaahhhhhhhh”, this time with pain, helplessness but no disgust.
She shrieked her soul out and dropped me to the ground, scattered all over the floor, giving to the golden tiles, the deep red color, that had just left Nandini’s life.
Nandini, shocked, hurt and terrified, was made to take her next step to cross me over to the other side.
I distinguish life and death. I distinguish joy and mourning. I distinguish colors and white. I am Vermilion.
I hope now you know who the narrator is, and understand what I wanted to deliver through this story.
Being the only first financially independent lady in my bloodline, I started speaking up for my values and existence, but until then, this taboo against widows and the concept to nullify the value of a female unless she is married and then only sustain it till she remains married, existed really dominantly, and hence, I want you to know as you turn into a grown-adult lady tomorrow, that never question your worth nor underestimate your existence in your own pretty brown skin.
You and every all the beautiful ladies in my bloodline need to know the history of this evil social practice and be proud of the fact that their ancestral lady fought against it, for them to have an equal and respectable life in our society and family today!
Always remember to be proud of what your marriage brings to you, but never associate your entire existence or value and association to it!
With love,
Granny