by Nikita Gill
-
We kissed in April. Your lips tasted of the sea. The sea is a part of my childhood. A childhood where I sailed, and swam with dolphins, and danced with old sailors with wooden legs. A childhood where my grandmother made me fresh cream with garden picked strawberries to eat at the beach. A childhood where my mother and I would run along the beach till we got soaked in the waves and my father wouldn’t stop laughing at us.
You tasted of my childhood.
- We met in March. Three days post him. Remember that March is important to me. It was the month in which I forgot two and a half years of pain, to be with you. The sun shone that day after ten days of grey cloudy skies that threatened of storm. But it was March, so the storm evaded us completely.
It would come back. It always does.
Trust
The problem with trust is, that when it breaks, your heart breaks with it. You find yourself standing alone in the dark where once you had someone whose hand you could hold. You find yourself broken where you were once strong. We feel like we’re brilliant when we are in love... but in trust we are safe. Or are we really? Can we ever really be?
[The eyes receive approximately 90 percent of all our information, making us basically visual creatures.] The problem with trust is, when it is betrayed, we get damaged. And more damaged than I have ever been before. My heart feels like it’s been laid on ice, and once it has worn away, the numbness will disappear and all that will remain is the bruised, cracked fracture that spins around it and over again.
[The romantics call eyes the windows to your soul. Mine saw nothingness in yours.]
The problem with trust is, I have short term memory loss. And tomorrow, I shall break and fracture and crack myself all over again. [Lipstick marks can sometimes be stronger than eyes or bones.]
Spineless
My mother always told me I was born with four spines. They stay there, side by side, in my ramrod straight back, the reason for my very correct posture. So when my back began to arch, people noticed.
My parents were first. You look different, they would suppose as I would approach every morning for breakfast. Is something wrong? My mother would question. Are you ill? My father would ask.
I had a gift with the vague and I used it to my only advantage in this scenario. Because telling them the truth would be a lot more devastating. How would I tell them about the fact that my bones, my spine, the very part of me they admired most, was depreciating?
I suppose the trouble with most relationships is to trust someone, knowing that you would willingly lie to them, just to protect them from getting hurt. We all do it, and those of us who claim we don’t, only lie because their lies are smaller. I lied to protect them from what had happened to my bones. Not just my spine. All my bones.
The thing with bones are, they are on the inside of you and they grow in whatever direction they want. You do not have a say on it. Just like I didn’t have a say when I fell in love with you. You began to grow inside, quite like another, more twisted, less straight spine. You were a sharp, painful object, made of something stronger than granite. All four of my spines were put to work dealing with you and they still weren’t enough. I took each one for granted, till there were none left. And when I had nothing left to break, you decided you needed something that wasn’t broken to start all over again. Human bone is stronger than granite, my father had read out to me at the dining table.
A block of bone the size of a matchbox can support nine tonnes-that is four times as much as concrete can support. He smiles as he tells me these facts, in a way that breaks my heart.
I can only imagine how difficult it was for you to crush the entire skeleton that was me.
Growth
There is delectability to the imperfection of human ritual she had long since forgotten. It came from the incapability of understanding social situations because they made her nervous.
Her doctors had insisted that it was post traumatic stress disorder that she had suffered from almost drowning as a child. It came with its nuances, like headaches, and shaking hands. None of them really bothered her. None except for the fact that she bit her nails. She had spent a majority of her life biting them, particularly when other people were around. She figured, if her mouth was busy, then she wouldn’t have to spend her time talking. Words would stumble out of her mouth on occasion and even to her, they sounded alien.
The tattooed boy met her on a day when she had almost had a nervous breakdown and he had nails that were much longer than hers. She had read somewhere that it took nails six months to grow from base to tip. Maybe if she used those difficult alien objects called words, he would actually talk to her. So she stopped biting.
For a while, things were good. She noticed that she had not finished the last two books she had bought, that her mother left a few corners of the bed unmade on purpose sometimes and that her father always lost a pen a fortnight. Ritual in the unmade, just like her nails had been to her.
And then she began to notice other things. The tattooed boy whom she had come to love (if constantly thinking of someone long enough not to breathe was love) had his own little rituals. Like noticing what hurt her most and repeating it to see her in pain. And deliberately leaving the lipstick the others left on his collar to watch her reaction to it. She found that ripping out her nails made it easier for her to justify his actions. Each nail gave her a few more minutes of throbbing, painful release.
It was only when she ripped the last one out did she realize that each finger and toenail takes six months to grow from base to tip. And this time, when she finally grew her nails to their tip, she noticed her own little imperfect human ritual. She measured the amount she loved herself by how long her nails are.