by Nikita Gill
* Did you know that when someone dies their body weight drops quite suddenly? It is not really noticeable unless you have held them close whilst they are dying, praying to every god that you won’t lose them. It is just a touch. But it’s there when they leave you.
Twenty one grams. That is the weight of a human soul.
Second Language English
I took your adjectives for granted. There was something about the way you skipped over your ‘s’es and gleaned over your ‘i’s and ‘e’s that never really made me want to kiss you. You’d sit there with your languid fingers clutching a book that was half finished and read me words that were completely mispronounced. It would prickle me under my skin and I would grit my teeth, wondering when you would stop. I would never understand the english language you thought you spoke and your confidence in your own words annoyed me.
It was comical when you spoke in front of our friends. Your mistaken pronunciation of the word ‘pronunciation’ in particular made them giggle. I would stand in a corner, clutching a glass of rum and coke and cringe, flushing in second hand embarrassment. You would smile at me from across the room, and continue with your tangled tongue as though nothing was wrong.
I felt sorry for you. But not sorry enough when you took your favourite writing pen from my desk, your dog eared thesaurus and left my apartment for the last time. I would lie if I said I wasn’t relieved for the respite from mistaken english and broken words.
It took them screaming at each other next door, the rejection letter arriving, my finger joints beginning to ache for me to realise; I missed your easy enunciation of the word ‘beautiful’, the cresendo in ‘adoration’ and yes, even the fluidity in ‘talented’. You pronounced phonetically to brain code a language that was not first nature to you. The way your fingers curved at the typewriter now made me misunderstand my own at the keyboard of a computer.
I called you today, and you told me she is an English Major, and she loves you most when you argue with your vowels.
I was right, you did speak a language I wasn’t wise enough to understand.
Bloodline
We liked to drive to the border and park the truck so we were in both places at once, just to show each other how different the places we came from were.
You would always say that our blood lines lay in the history of how we learned to love. I would disagree that just because we made each other bleed once in a while didn’t mean we actually loved each other. And you would kiss me and taste like gold.
When they told me you were dying, I drove down alone in your truck, leaving you alone in the driveway because I couldn’t believe that this was the way you were going to let me go. I parked the truck and tried to tell myself about bloodlines and how they worked and love and differences and family and childhood.
I failed. You lied. Bloodlines didn’t lie in the history of how we learned to love.
Love lay in bloodlines that had history enough to love each other.
(I stole you and scattered you on the border because even if you taste like ash now, this is where you would want to be.)
This is Not a Story about Suicide
I am not here. These are not hospital walls. This is not a nurse who is speaking to me. That is not John unconscious, lying in a bed that faces due North, and that is not his mother trying to explain why his bed should always face North.
This is not happening. I am not taking a deep breath. I am not walking down the sickly white corridors with their bleach scent. I am not buying this cup of coffee from a cafeteria lady who is working at an hour that is reserved only for intensive care patients. This is not the way back to what is not John’s room.
That is not his heart rate dropping, and I am not running out of the room, screaming for help. We are not being pushed out, that door does not have a red light that claims intensive care, it has not been all night.
That is not John’s doctor explaining how they were not able to pump his stomach completely and it is not John who flat lined. That is not an empty hospital bed. That is not his mother in shock and these, these are definitely not my tears.
* This is not a funeral. And if it is a funeral, it is not John’s. Because it just can’t be. I met him last week and he was fine.
We were fine.
*
“Name an unusual fact about the stomach.” He has asked me on one of our study dates.
“The stomach has acids strong enough to dissolve zinc.” I answered. So he ate lead instead.
Capillaries
The distance between Dublin and Boston is approximately 3000 miles. You told me this when you were staring south west with the kind of madness I have only seen in sailor’s eyes when they lived in lighthouses too small for their giant ship dreams. It should have worried me, that glint in your eyes. I just dismissed it as one of your navigational tantrums.
When we went to the pub later that evening, you told me I should have the fish and chips, but the way you like it, with more vinegar and no tartar sauce. I said that made it too salty, and you told me that was how real sailors ate their fish. My reactions always were slow to your behavior. I believe the expression ‘at sea’ was applied more often than not when you spoke.
I never thought that the walks you mentioned on the beach when we were children had any more to the idea than the romance of it all. So when you told me you belonged to the sea, I thought you were talking about your soul.
It never truly meant anything to me until I saw the letter with my name where your boat had been at the dock. I wish you knew that I swam after your lost trail long after you had gone, until she, like the jealous lover she was, forced me to lose my breath somewhere in the freezing depths of the water.
I have never quite regained it.
The distance between Dublin and Boston is 2991.42 miles, exactly. My now shallow lungs contain 300,000 million capillaries. If I laid them end to end, they would stretch 1500 miles.
I would do it, if I knew that you would lay yours out too…and meet me halfway.
Insomnia
I am only an insomniac when it rains. The pitter patter of the raindrops reminds me of the pitter patter of cat paws.
(He liked to cuddle at my feet when I could barely think, just to make me feel better. I think you used to tell him to.) I wish I could wrap your memories around my spine and wear them as a backbone, because they are stronger than the arch my broken spined back seems to have developed of late.
(Spines are oddly brittle, and a lot like wrists. Easy to break and forever to heal.) But I cannot depend of any of that anymore. So I wear red lipstick and high heels and go to parties and tell strangers how amazing they are to be wearing red lipstick and high heels and how different they must be to come to this party instead of the other one.
(All because you would hate parties and think nightlife is so stupid.) It is what I do with my insomnia. Because my spineless back, the memories of you incessantly looped in my sleeplessly addled brain and the raindrops remind me how I am not like you. How I am not brave and how I hate parties but go to be closer to the version of you my memories are still looping. When I come home, I kick off my high heels and smear my red lipstick across my face.
(And all that is left is a catless, thin skinned, broken spined girl, trying to learn how to be brave.)
Repopulation
When they will look back at his life, they will tell you that it was the moment he won his first medal at the interschool swim meet of 1999. He was fourteen, a freshman, new on the team and the underdog, for all intents and purposes. They talked about it in the local papers as one of the greatest achievements a fourteen year old had managed in the county.
But the truth was, like all men with overindulgent mothers, he was told that he was different, that he was special. So when he grew up with the idea that he was God’s gift to women, no one should have been surprised, but they were, regardless.
After all, his mother had raised him alone, surely he had learned respect for women from th
ere. His bedroom in his luxurious New York apartment, given to him by the firm where he was a trusted, well known and received attorney, was like a beach, with blonde, brunette and auburn haired beauties that all left, in tears.
He had read somewhere that the world would one day come to an end and that if it did have to be repopulated, one man with incredibly fast acting sperm (dubbed by scientists as superman sperm) would be able to do it in the span of six months.
Which is why he was so careful with contraceptives. There was no doubt in his mind that his sperm was that kind, and any kind of accident at this point would not do.
It wasn’t until the November of the year 2021, three years post the War that Ended It All, where the ration of women to men was 1000 to 1, that he decided to actually use his gift for the benefit of man kind, signing himself up for the experiments the scientists were offering so as to artificially inseminate and help repopulate the earth. He had even smiled at the extremely attractive nurse and told her that his soldiers would do enough work for the whole world, as he had read somewhere.
Yes, one man certainly could repopulate the entire planet in only six months, if every single one of his 10 million sperm cells is successful, every single day.
Our man believed that he was that kind of man. Unfortunately for him, but fortunately for the rest of female kind, it turned out that speed and swimming had been his forte only in his youth.
Bones
“There are good days and there are bad days,” you would say to me as you would try and explain away why the whiskey bottle was empty again this morning, why you smelled like her and why you thought it was best to let me know what you had done. At least that way, you were absolved of the gift of lying; the one your bones were too light to lift and just couldn’t take, by bestowing me with betrayal.
My mother would bring me an encouraging cup of tea in a giant pink mug instead of a cup and explain, “There are good days and there are bad days.” Her eyes were always full of positive energy and strength and good will. I look back to those days and try and gain the strength she had in her bones from her words. I always fail.
They told me I had a disease within my bones. It started from the bottom of my knee and was moving upwards. Because that is what bones did. They broke from the inside out. “There will be good days and bad days,” they warned me and I know at that point that it was going to eat my bones and spit them out once the muscle and strength from them had melted.
There have been good days and bad days, I tell myself as I hold your hand waiting for the last of the treatments that may save the structure that is holding me together before it falls apart completely. You ask me if I would like some water. I say yes, a glass, if it would help my bones grow back. It worked for plants. It may work for me, too.
You look at me, puzzled for a few seconds before asking if I am all right.
“Today is a bad day.” I say quietly, “I can feel it in my bones.”
Fragments
I call them fragments, the parts of me that were too exhausted to stay. He calls them flecks because I am a flake. I wish I was a flake. It sounds prettier than being a fragment. Flakes are like snow. Soothing, falling from the sky on the tip of his tongue that melt and disappear. Fragments are archeological findings of a scarred past we really should not remember. I want to remember my scars. So I am a fragment.
- I draw on my legs. When my skin dries out, I use my index finger as a pencil and draw what the clouds are trying to tell me. Sometimes it’s a dog, and sometimes it’s a bear and sometimes it is his face looking at me disapprovingly.
That is when I stop drawing.
- At night, when the rain falls, I sit at the bay window and pretend to write stories whilst he pretends to sleep. “What are you writing?” he will ask in his asleep voice. “A funny story.” It is not. It is a pale, scary story, and it looks like my skin. “Were you dreaming?” I will ask him and he will always nod and say, “Yes, a good dream.” No, it is not. I have seen how his skin tenses and sweats in the moonlight when he sleeps.
- I worry when I read scientific facts, so he hides the newspapers from me when he is done. I always find them and spread them out on the table till every inch of it is covered. They say that the average human sheds eighteen kilograms of skin throughout their lifespan. I am not sure about how I feel about the fragments dropping in trains and cars and planes and traveling to places I shall never go.
-
“Do you think you’ll ever go to Japan?”
“Doubt it. I shall never have the money.”
“I bet parts of you have already got there.”
“You and your fragments.”
“Me and my fragments. We’re both so uncomfortable.”
“My fragments and I. And it’s not you, or them that are uncomfortable.”
“What, then.” “It is just the skin you are in.”
I Bet You Got This On Tape
This is not a story about you. This isn’t the story of how I stayed up all night simply because I learned that we grew 8mm in our sleep, and that terrified me. It isn’t the story of how I counted your eyelashes and wished I could multiply their length in a million, and ask you to love me that much. It isn’t the story of the sob I broke just so I could split it in half and hand you the better part of me that could handle tears.
This isn’t the story of how you chose to sleep whenever I was awake, and enjoy my terror with the chuckle of the poppy down an addict’s nose. It isn’t the story of my half toned veins were darkened by your uneven sense of breathing ink onto them, and its not the one about how you chose to shadow in my tears with your paintbrush because you loved the way they dripped onto the floor.
This isn’t the story of how we fell in the wrong kind of love where the darkness seemed to be better than the light, and secret ideas became the basis of strength. This isn’t about a musician and a writer and how they saw the stars as a trail across a galaxy. This isn’t any of that.
But more importantly than any of that, this is definitely not a story about you.
Because this is the story of how perfect it is to watch a glasshouse fall, over and over again.
Her Nails
Did you know that each finger nail and toe nail takes six months to grow from root to tip?
Neither did I. And to be honest, I didn’t care.
I used to bite my nails. I started chewing a long time ago, perhaps from an event that terrified me, perhaps from nerves, I don’t remember anymore. But somehow, biting them made me feel better. Chewing keratin off gave me a sense of winning something, when honestly I had not won something in years. I felt like if nothing else, the auto-cannibalism was the one thing I could control in my life.
The thing with addiction is, when you see someone else who is inflicted, you know instantly. What they do not understand is, we are kind of like warriors. The white towers are places where something we need is captured and like knights saving a princess at no matter what cost, those towers give way to allow us passage. It is a never ending game we play with ourselves trying to tell ourselves that one day we will win and that we will find the treasure we are hunting for, be it princess or gold.
I saw her the first time when I happened to gaze outside my bedroom window. She looked like something out of a fairytale…at least from the back of her head. She did not turn even once and I could not see her face, just her luxurious auburn hair that fell to her waist. What I did recognize were her hands. Those were the hands of one like me. They shook mildly and she would bring them to her face for moments at a time…when they returned by her sides, I would notice the sparkle of saliva for a second before it dried. She was not nearly as bad as me, her fingernails still retained a shape. Mine were barely there, and it somehow made me feel the wiser, stronger one of the two of us.
That, however, did not last for long. Over the days I would see the back of her head, I would sometimes notice blood dripping from her fingertips, revealing to me that she was getting closer and closer to
her goal. She was braver than me. I did not have the courage to wage war against the pink towers yet. She did.
It didn’t really hit me until I noticed bandages on each of her ten fingernails and the way she had to hold something whilst standing up just how brave she was compared to me. They were gone. Each of her fingernails were gone. I stared at the back of her head and wondered, had she ripped them out? Surely not…that would be cheating. And warriors don’t cheat. I narrowed my eyes and stared at my own nails. Surely she should be happier now that she had reached her destination.
But she just boarded the bus as she always did, and left.
The next day, she stopped coming to the bus stop. That was the day I stopped biting my nails.
Six
August brings sounds of emptiness...
- We parted in July. I loved you too much. I had not thought that would become too much for you to handle. And that we would part on a technicality. It was a stormy eve. And the lightening broke us apart, so easily it almost made you glad. I know. The storm outside matched the storm in your voice.
I’ll always be surprised at what can happen when two people begin to hate each other.
- We fought in June. When your work was getting you down and your parents were putting pressure on you and your world seemed to be falling apart. I wanted to help you. I tried. You told me to leave you alone.
I did.
- We talked for hours in May. And you told me about your life, about the broken dreams and the mesmerizing aspirations that you once had. And I told you about my responsibilities and my hopes. We understood each other.
We thought we would have an eternity to discuss other things. Like a future and the distance and the friends who thought you were not good enough and that I was too much of a dreamer.