Footsteps

You were strange.

I didn’t know you. I grew up fascinated by you almost. The way a child is fascinated by the glistening trail of slime that a snail leaves behind. With apprehensive curiosity. Or maybe the way a dog is fascinated by a burning fire cracker spinning on the ground. With fearful longing.

Your skin was speckled and dotted with grey spots. You didn’t even have to have your arms hanging by your side for them to be covered with raised veins.

Did you know, sometimes when you slept, I used to sneak into your room and touch your skin. My tiny heart would be thumping in my throat, my eyes would be wide like the golf balls. I would tip toe in by myself, none of the others dared join me, I would fix my eyes on you and approach. You weren’t even peaceful in your sleep. Heavy, laborious breathing. It almost rivalled the steady drone of the AC.
I’d walk up to you and touch the veins on your arms, pressing them down gently and watching them rise back up. Your skin was so soft. I didn’t understand how it was so soft when it looked so scaly.

Sometimes when I looked at you I felt like crying. You were so lonely, I knew. My parents, my cousin’s parents – your children – were always trying to make you happy. They brought you your favourite foods and they talked to you about their lives and they brought old friends to visit you. But even though you smiled politely back, your eyes were still heavy and full.

I wonder if you remembered me. All those grandchildren running everywhere, how could you know the difference? But I always felt connected to you.

Shall I tell you what I had wanted? Your liquid eyes were always so sad, their colour lightening over time. I wanted to hug you. To poke you and see if you’d react to me and say, ‘You are my favourite grandchild’ and have your eyes fill up with happiness and colour as you gathered me in your arms.

Did you know that?
I think you did.

My mum told me you were so quiet because you missed grandmother. Is that true? I suppose it must be. It must be her you carried in your eyes, and her in your plodding footsteps, and her in your puffs of breath.

Yesterday, I divorced my husband. He said he didn’t love me anymore. We’ve been separated for a few months now, so I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.
But I am.

I don’t know why, but it made me think of you.

These past few months, when I’ve been happy – which isn’t a rarity, in general I suppose I’m quite a happy person – I feel like there is a black cloud above my happiness.

And in that black cloud are all the other happy things I could be doing, or would be doing. If maybe he hadn’t moved out, he could be doing this happy thing with me right now. Or I could be somewhere else doing something happy with him. But I’m not. I’m here, and I’m happy, and I’m without him.

That’s strange isn’t it? To feel unhappy about being happy. Or to feel unhappy about something that made you happy.

Did you feel like that too? Did all your memories of grandmother make you feel the way my memories of him make me feel?

All those times we laughed together, danced together, slept together, held each other, cried together- all the things that made me happy- now they crush me. They are like arrows in my body. Every time I touch them, they sear me with needles of pain. But I cannot bear to go through the pain of taking them out, and worse, to stitch the gaping wounds they’ll leave.

The memories are diamond dust in my throat. Slowly killing me with their deceptive beauty.

I miss you.

Do you know?

I miss you very much. I don’t understand how I do since you were only a part of my life for the first six years. I’m 36 now. Thirty years have gone by since I said goodbye to you.

It’s difficult to forget your face that day. It was as if each crevice of a wrinkle on your face hid tiny lead balls that made your skin sag even further. Your movements were heavier than I had ever seen them to be, but something was different, and I knew it. You were heavier- but lighter. Is that possible? Every step you took seemed to be purposeful if not hesitant.

I felt the sadness that came with each look at you diminish somehow, or maybe it was just pushed into a depth that I did not know I had in me. For some reason, I knew you had made up your mind about something and it filled you with a light. A dark light, I think now.

I remembering wanting desperately to see your eyes, but your back was to me.
I followed you furtively, my every step a new espionage film.
I saw you walk into your room, and so I went into the next.

There was a door that connected the two; I pressed my ear to it. There was a scraping of something heavy on the tiled floor. A chair.

My heart began to beat. A steady drum roll, hammering at me from inside out. I worried you’d hear me and stop. Now, sometimes I wish you had.

I’m not sure what compelled me to do it, but I made up my mind quite suddenly and pushed open the door.

I wish I could have seen the shapes in your eyes.

When your figure vanished from the window, I did not wait to hear the ensuing thump as I ran out the door, down the six flights of stairs to you.

My breath became heavy like yours, my each step forward heavy like yours, my eyes turned to mules of burden like yours. I could see you.

A tiny, tangled mass of blood, body and emotion.

I approached you steadily, no one else knew just yet, and my heart rate slowed.
I stopped when I was right beside you- as close as if you were sleeping and I was poking the veins on your arm- and watched you.

I could almost see each memory of her float up from you towards the heavens. I could see you sit on each wisp and ride the strands of thought all the way up to the cloudless, blue, burning hot sky.

Is it odd that for the first time you looked peaceful? Your head wasn’t whole, your body wasn’t straight, your heart wasn’t working. But you were peaceful.


When I was finally satisfied that you were happy, I turned and left. My breath was even, my footsteps were light, my eyes clear.

I stopped before the end and turned to look at you. There you lay, and from you to me there was a trail of footsteps. Tiny feet shaped with your blood. I looked down behind me and saw the last one. Did it make me sad? I’m not sure how I felt anymore.

One day I hope you’ll help me find the freedom that you found.

Monster

Sometimes I feel
As though everything inside is
Alive.

A monster throwing itself
At the wrought iron bars
That make up its cage.

Sometimes I feel that if
You came too close
The monster would pull you in.

He would wrap his claws around
Your body and crush you
To pulp.

Sometimes I want you to
Come near enough
But mostly, I hope you don’t.

Because I know
That after tasting your blood
The monster would crave you more

And once you have been inside
I know you’ll want to run
And hide.

But the monster and I
Will miss you sourly
And so,

I hope you don’t.

The Virus and I

It’s one of the bad nights.

The feeling of unease and trouble has expanded beyond my liver and has spread through the capillaries on the inside of my stomach to the ends of my body. My fingers weigh down on the bed on which I lie like lead bullets. The blood flowing through them is infected and rich with the virus. This unnamed virus.
I wonder what it is.

This germ, this multiplying agent that invades my ostensibly impenetrable, but weak as jelly cells. It enters on the most unexpected, or the most expected, days and nights and begins its quick and efficient siege of my body, mind and being.
I am powerless to stop it.

So, I shut the door. Shut out the people. Lie in the sun, or in the moon, and wallow in my own waste. Wallow in my own mind’s filth and enemies till my chest is heaving and my eyes are dry from staring.

Sometimes I think you could make it go away. But you don’t live inside me, you don’t know the dark dangers that lurk in the crevices and corners of my body. In the hollow by my elbow, or the fold behind my knee. Evils and cruel creatures hide there. They wait impatiently for a chance to travel up my blood to my brain where they set fire to all that stands. They dance in voodoo trances with their eyes burning in anarchy.

I roll to my side and realize that this is my only prison. I do not rattle the bars of my isolation, it’s been too many years. My fingers are callused from holding the freezing metal. Now I stare listlessly out and wait for them to elevate till I can walk freely again.

But tonight is a bad night.

I curl on my side and I’m crying again. I’m not sad. I’m not weak. Sometimes, all the colours of thoughts and feeling build up and the inferno inside releases the darkly coloured, stained fumes till there is no room for my organs to breathe. The only way to let out the colours, the fumes, the toxins is through tears.I selfishly release them. One by one, sometimes many at a time.

The bursting is lessening, the hysterics and theatrics have calmed. Now that the fireworks have shot through the sky and polluted the clarity, the smoke lingers but the storm begins to pass.

Sometimes, I wonder how you’d feel if you saw me like this. I expect your eyes would widen till I could see the whites like neon sticks in the night, and your mouth would open just the slightest. And I expect you’d question your love for me. And what you’d known of me.

But I never really know. Maybe you’d do what I secretly want for you to do if one day you were to stumble upon me in my state of self erosion. Maybe you would rush to me and hold me tight till you almost parted my skin and entered my being. And then collectively, we could fight the virus, the antigen, and smash it down till it disintegrated into the depths of my flesh again. I’d want you to smell the way you do, till your scent was the only air in me to clean out the pollutants and the fog.

Still, I never really know.

And until you find me, which I suppose I hope you don’t, I am left alone to struggle with the consequences of the self destruct button.

If you find me, which I hope you don’t, know that I made the virus. And the virus belched out a part of my soul.

And don’t you love all of my soul?

Welcome to my kingdom. We live here in chaotic harmony, the virus and I. Join us, won’t you?

Introduction

Why do I write?

I guess I write for the same reason art exists.

To make you feel.
It's the most rewarding thing to have someone tell me one of my pieces made them feel. To stir up emotions in another human being through a piece of writing that has nothing to do with them- what a feat! But the only reason they feel is if they find bits of themselves in the writing. Bits of their memory, emotion, past.

And I guess that is good writing. Writing that is human. Emotion that is real.

I hope my writing makes you feel.
Because bits of me are in everything I write.

So, I hope it stirs something in You.