by Nikita Gill
YOUR BODY IS AN OCEAN
LOVE AND OTHER EXPERIMENTS
BY NIKITA GILL Nikita Gill is a twenty four year old girl who lives in the extremes of laughter and sadness. She likes people who live somewhere on the brink as well and that is who she draws inspiration from. If you recognise yourself in here, you should try and remember the tall, lanky girl who was somewhere in your vicinity a while ago. If you recognise yourself in here, thank you for the inspiration. Copyright 2012c
Nikita Gill
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of the author.
Cover Design by Nikita Gill
For my parents, who have always been my guiding light. For my brother, who is my other half. For my friends, who know me better than I would like to admit. Everybody has a secret world inside of them. All of the people of the world, I mean everybody. No matter how dull and boring they are on the outside, inside them they’ve all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds. Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands maybe.
Neil Gaiman
Content
Introduction. 08
Foreword by David Gauthier. 09
Three Almost Fairytales A Little Bit of Wonderland. 16 A Rose in Oz. 18
Forever Neverland. 20
Lists by Fiverse It is Impossible to. 23 Pros and Cons. 24
Seventeen in Phases. 25 Seasonal Liar. 27
Why I Hate Romantic Comedies. 29
Conversations by Tens Inside Out. 32
On Wishes. 35
Issues. 37
The Wanting. 39 Textbook Breakup. 41 Constructive Criticism. 43 Starving. 45
After Words. 47 Cinnamon Souls. 49 Austenesque. 52
Fifteen on Humanity Obsession. 55
Second Language English. 57 Bloodline. 59
This is Not a Story about Suicide. 60 Capillaries. 62
Insomnia. 64
Repopulation. 66
Bones. 68
Fragments. 70
I Bet You Got This on Film. 72 Her Nails. 74
Six. 76
Trust. 78
Spineless. 79
Growth. 81
Introduction
At some point, no matter how obscure this little thing is, someone is going to ask me why I wrote it. I wrote it to prove something to myself. That when you truly love something, at some point, you have to sit down and just do it. I wrote it for every single time I have thought, ‘that would make a great story‘. I wrote it for the people who told me I could write. I wrote it for the people who told me I couldn’t write. I wrote it because of Neil Gaiman, and Jane Austen, and William Wordsworth and Sylvia Plath. I wrote it for the seconds by metaphors I have let pass me by.
But most importantly, more important than any of what is listed above, I wrote this book for you.
Foreword
David Gauthier
Lose track of sight. From your mind, take flight. Travel out your forehead, about sweat from a day much too long, past smells travelling a trail forced crooked when you once fell; onward (right) beneath the twitching lid that knows the knife; moving down over quivering left by the first lips not your own; further, toward a jaw no longer even; fall to dents imprinted by thumbs of those you were meant to love; sink in through the flesh and skin; glide along the raspy remnants of the first inhale; and stop a while – deep, where there is no light to offer comfort amidst screaming from the palpitating coffin of your inner child.
You didn’t forget, did you – when the future became this? We (all of us) face our trials and tests. We justify our plight by revising past to sway and flow with the skill of meaning. As one navigates to their first beginning, order seems counter to one’s being.
Memory is associative. Musings are tangential. Maxim is mangled. We focus on the misplaced bread crumbs of history – hoping never again to stray from the prize at the center. Arrival yields deceit. The ginger-bread house is occupied by the elderly cannibals and wolves dressed as sheep. Some settle for what they find while others sigh toward the exit on the other side.
How can we find ourselves if we do not know our purpose? Walking tear-stained floor-boards of life’s labyrinth is surely a test designed for those with stone hearts and madness. Lament: all are invited and none shall pass. Run the wheel, press the second button for a meal, and there is electroshock beyond the seventh seal. Remember it all and hope it repeats; proceed toward an end you perceive. Be warned of twists and turns you will not believe while trying not to weep or fall to your knees. Wasn’t there somewhere this was supposed to lead?
Submitted for approval, an alternate notion. It’s not a maze, but an ocean.1 Nikita Gill offers a collection of fragments and shards from her daily bread numbering roughly 33 (sar*zan as some might read). Be they fact, fiction, or tricks of memory; be advised that what you see will be the truth in life as it is only found somewhere between.
1 You must ascend before you can breathe11 “We know only too well that what we are doing is nothing more than a drop in the ocean. But if the drop were not there, the ocean would be missing something.”
-- Mother Teresa
Some, be it by choice or by need, specialize in humanity.
YOUR BODY IS AN OCEAN
LOVE AND OTHER EXPERIMENTS
BY NIKITA GILL
Three Almost Fairytales
A Little Bit of Wonderland
Her name was Alyssa, and when she was nine her mother built her wonderland. After being raised on a healthy diet of Charles Dickens, Enid Blyton and J.M. Barrie, it seemed like the only course of action. She created it out of paper, each scene indispensably, indisputably perfect in its imperfection.
And she did it because Alyssa was terrified of the idea of falling through a rabbit hole, into a place that allows magic only when you are confused. Mothers do the most impractical, exhausting things to show how much they love their children. It seemed a pity that it was this very effort that kept Alyssa up all night, staring at the paper people like they were coming to get her.
(If Alyssa’s mother knew, she would have spent all her time trying to explain to the little girl that it wasn’t just paper people she should be afraid of.)
- God appeared to have a sense of humour when little Alice became Alyssa’s best friend. She lives across the street, her hair always wild when she would run over in the same little blue dress and tell Alyssa the strangest stories. Having understood that paper people were no longer meant to be feared, Alyssa listened with wide eyes to her paper story loving friend, becoming a part of a landscape that housed fairies and pixies and odd little men with funny hats and talking animals.
It accepted her into its folds gradually and in a tree house made by Alice’s father, they tried to understand why ravens actually hated writing desks and how hares would actually hate tea, but perhaps love coffee.
(This was before Alice’s mother left and her eyes broke, and they grew to understand that people grew apart better with pain than distance.)
- James liked to drink coffee and wear funny hats and gave people rabbits as gifts. And he had never read anything about wonderland. So of course, Alyssa had to fall in love with him. She counted the droplets of water on his eyelashes and wondered about how someone who has promised himself to her so effortlessly could possibly be seventy two point eight percent water; all this because water was so easy to drain away.
She called him the Mad Hatter. He never quite understood the reason behind the name.
(That’s the thing with being in wonderland. It never really likes to acknowledge its own existence.)
A Rose in Oz
R
ose is a girl a lot like Dorothy with big dreams in a little place, and a house that often falls apart. She is named for her mother’s most favourite flower and often kisses a wishing star before it turns into a shooting star. She has never been chased by tornados, but she does like chasing them. One day, if she is very careful, she will get swept away in one. She doesn’t understand girls like Cinderella who don’t actually like hard work and would never give up her voice for a man like the Little Mermaid.
It was no wonder then, that the mirror hates Rose more than it would ever hate Dorothy. Because she argues with her mother, fights with her father, and most importantly, does not have a little dog like Toto.
[What she has is a nasty black cat who doesn’t seem to like her much either, but that’s neither here nor there.]
- Rose always had wanted to know what the yellow brick road was like. So she painted the road on her arm so she could trail it every night before she slept. It somehow helped that the emerald green tattoo of her name on her wrist seemed to glow in the moonlight, quite like Oz would. When she awakens in the mornings, she pulled her knees up to her chest, so she could see how her ribs form as though her skin will burst, just so she can put a pencil through the backs of her knees and hold it there, twirling it.
When she twirls a hundred, she stops and stands, hold her breath and stares at herself in the bathroom mirror, so she could count her ribs slowly. And then she trails the yellow brick road all over again.
[It’s amazing how she has done this every single morning for seven years, and still manages to miscount her ribs, each and every time.]
- Rose sings to a boy named Bradley, and she does it only because he has the kind of hands that can cover her eyes without letting the sunlight through. And when she finally comes back to bed when he is in it, he touches her face rubs his rough thumb against her cheekbone. His hand finds its way from her face to his hips and I know why. And for a while, she supposes it is not too much to ask for a love that is determined by the shape of her hip bones.
That is before Bradley uses his hands to understand the shape of someone else’s face on the only day she forgets to follow the yellow brick road.
[ And it is at that moment, that Rose decided she would rather be the Wicked Witch of the West. Because being Dorothy would always leave her back in Kansas at the end.]
Forever Neverland
Jenna hated Tinkerbell. She hated her because she had wings and she could fly whereas Jenna stayed on the ground, catching fireflies. The fireflies made it easy because they knew she would let them go. She would stare at their radiant light in awe and try and understand how something so little can shine so very bright.
She tried to pretend the bread she had in the mornings was ice cream flavoured, and even imagined her little brother had never been taken from them but had been enthralled and forever lost in Neverland. When she tried to explain this to her mother, she would not look at her, usually by leaving the room.
For a little girl who had the hope of the world resting quite easily on her head as a crown, she knew. She knew that one day, he would come for her and maybe, maybe they could be together again.
She slept on a bed of green, with a desk of wood and a massive window that made her love rooftops and the sky. She didn’t want to meet Peter Pan. She wanted to BE him, and lead a group of boys who were more lost that she could ever be. So lost that they were found.
Jenna’s mind was made up when she saw the missing boy posters all over milk cartons. She knew what she would be when she grew up. She would be Peter Pan.
( The irony of this never quite occurred to her until her twenty second birthday, when the boy she loved and knew to be less than perfect, became perfect by losing himself to her forever.)
List of Fiverse
It is Impossible to
1. Count every single twinkle in the sky, or your father’s eye.
2. Meet every person on earth, and still know how to love them all
3. Keep count of every drop of rain, every time it pours.
4. Grow a tail, (Even with lessons from the cat) or wings (Even with lessons from the birds).
5. Not to love your dog, especially when he greets you like you are the light in his world.
6. To see the back of your own head without a mirror, and just hope there isn’t a hole where your brain is meant to be.)
7. Have a whole month of Sundays and not wish the medication was working when you are doing nothing.
8. Sketch a pair of wings on a pig, and try and make it fly.
9. Wish Christmas could come in July just so you could see him sooner.
10. Make you believe that I love you, even if you have never chosen to love yourself.
Pros and Cons
1. I am not writing a list of things that will make me hate you, as you supposed, but more a list that would help me move on. I always hated how you were very practical that way, even about emotional distress. I am not writing about the trouble with you being your incorrigible logic, your lack of tact.
2. I am not writing this because I have a habit of doing what you say, and perhaps, just maybe this would give me closure.
3. I am not going to write about how beautiful your mouth is, and how it seems like something that would have been kisses by an angel.
4. I am not going to write about how your voice tremors when you speak of loneliness.
5. I am not going to write about how you are worthy of songs and dances and plays to be written for your lack of wonder at war, sex or alcohol, you aren’t that interesting.
6. I am not going to write about the day you sat me down and dragged me down with you, just so you could complain about how much I loved angel wings and sketches of pretty eyes and generous eyebrows.
7. I am not going to write about pros or cons because honestly, I don’t see any point in giving you what you want anymore.
8. I am going to write about us. And it won’t be the list you asked for. It will be a novel of a thousand pages, embedded in a million tears.
Seventeen in Phases
1. It was because her parents had named her for the grandmother who had broken her mother’s heart. The grandmother who was supposed to have melted from her birth and hadn’t.
That was why her mother barely looked at her. That was why she called her ‘girl’. That was why she liked to pretend she was the quiet woman in the background of an old black and white movie. Because everything here was like an old black and white movie.
[And if she really looked back, her mother had never appreciated the elegance of the 1950s enough.]
2. It was because she hated surprises. The surprise she got on her sixth birthday when her father left taught her just how a single person had the ability of taking your soul, splitting it in two and wearing it on their breast pocket like a white carnation waiting to die.
That was why when she lifted a book, she looked at the last page first. That was why her namelessness had become a comfort to her. That was why she understood how she was like a fizzy drink without the fizz, too cold coke left on a windowsill, and a half drawn painting sitting in the back of a sketchbook.
[ What she didn’t understand was why she never reacted when she heard a loud noise, a sudden movement...and most importantly, by the nightmares that crushed her chest every night.]
3. It was because she misunderstood the kiss he gave her that night. The sky was sparkling with diamonds, the air was thick with heat, the wind was enough to caress their fevered skin; it was too perfect for the flawed existence she had grown to know.
That was why when he tried to kiss her again, she asked him to kiss his unloved flaws, his bones instead. That was why her movements were so restricted when she touched him, why his hand fell away when she reached for him, why he never felt guilty for leaving her out in a storm at 3 a.m. Why she refused to let herself love him.
She was nothing but an almost lover, an almost friend, an almost daughter. The little bit of left over hot chocolate in a cup that had long s
ince been consumed.
[This is what happens when you don’t find yourself on the right side of seventeen.]
Seasonal Liar
1. She’s crying again and he’s watching her in silence, the way he always does. “I love you.” he says, his eyes fixed on the table her tears are falling so seamlessly on. She pauses to draw in a catch of air and studies him through her broken, white fingers.
And this time, the last time, she speaks. “You’re lying.”
2. He can’t take the onset of spring and when she walks in through the door, looking as fresh as a summer’s eve, he broke her so slowly that she didn’t even notice her bones were breaking.
3. She calls him her summer love, and even when the diamond like snowflakes fall on his face and make him blurry to look at, she thinks that summer looks like the winter cape never has on him.
He wishes he could take her back to summer where things are sweeter and worth so much more.
4. Winter has always been her favourite season. Every time her lips caress the window, sweetening the transparency with her breath. She does this less for herself now and more for the boy on the bicycle, who crosses the path of the red roofed, white flecked house every single day.
He lives for the foggy taste of winter in her breath, stroked with pale fingers of temporary warmth.
5. She wants to die. She wants to die because the sun doesn’t like to shine on her face the way it once did and the rabbits don’t come out and play and the little boy next door doesn’t call around anymore and everything should look better with glitter but it just doesn’t.
6. She’s crying again and he’s watching her in silence, the way he always does. “I love you.” he says, his eyes fixed on the table her tears are falling so seamlessly on. She pauses to draw in a catch of air and studies him through her broken, white fingers.