Work Text:
Transition is always a relief. Destination means death to me. If I could figure out a way to remain forever in transition, in the disconnected and unfamiliar, I could remain in a state of perpetual freedom.
Loneliness grows around me like an old friend. I sleep with sweet wise women whose names I do not remember the next morning and beautiful cold men who never bother to ask for mine.
It’s in the final hours of these nights that I find myself frequenting restaurants more than the usual pub. I welcome the warm bitter embrace of espresso with open arms.
It’s one of these moments in particular, when I’m perched on a barstool under the flickering overhead white lights drawing strange shadows against the discolored green tiles, that I think back to what he once said, that summer on the coast, after we had one of our worst fights. I can’t seem to remember how it ended nor am I willing to admit how it started. What I can share, however, is that hours later he had looked over at the young couple opposite us, cramped together in a tiny wine stained booth, and shook his head in disappointment.
“Diners are not for first dates,” he eventually said.
“Oh?” I asked, not bothering to look up.
“They are for break ups and for apologizing. Everyone knows," he says, except the last bit was mostly drowned out as he shoveled another serving of potatoes into his mouth.
“Everyone knows,” he repeated after swallowing.
The truth is I didn’t know and he eats every meal as if it’ll be his last. I want to tell him both of these things. Instead, what comes out is:
“Which one are we?”
He never answered me, I wrote in my diary of that day.
He never answered me and it hasn’t stopped raining all month. Heavy showers flood the cobbled city day in and day out. When it rains, I pray for the warmth of the sun. When it’s sunny, I can’t help but wish for rain. But deep down I know I need it; the cold, the discontent, the gray. No matter how much I long for the light I crave its absence. I suppose he’d say it’s human nature to want. Perhaps he is right but I can’t help but cast doubts. Maybe human desire isn’t inherently good. He once told me it is the mark of an ill heart for a person to secretly hope for everyone to be as miserable as themselves. I must admit, these days I’m overcome with sickness. He must understand. I have to believe we are all capable of such wretchedness for the truth is I can’t bear to be the only person with valves so damaged.
In Mumbai, monsoon season passes and I wear yellow again.
I go on walks in the early mornings through the nearly empty streets of the city and by the late afternoon military, merchants, and civilians alike, all push and prod their way through a seemingly endless crowd. The women adorn colorful dresses and children line themselves up along the concrete walls, observing the people below, not caring about the way the rough rocky edges leave light scratches along their bare skinny calves. I catch bits of Swahili whispered softly in between boisterous curses in Hindi, Farsi, and Tamil. Croatian muttered under breaths makes its way into my ears just as Ukrainian music drones on in the background. The noise is a refuge.
When the night comes I can’t sleep, and it is then that I write most. The soft hum of the generator and creaky floorboards beneath my bare mattress are my only companions in a silence this loud.
I’m embarrassed to say that buried in the pages of my diary I admitted this of the incident all those years ago in the opera house:
I can take care of myself.
And then, after a beat:
I don’t think I would mind being saved again.
When I woke the next day to the angry orange sun I reached underneath the mustard flower colored shawl for the book and hurriedly crossed it out. In its place I jot down the salty pink cardamom tea recipe the Kashmiri migrant who owns this house had shared with me when I first arrived.
I never made it.
Two summers later on the Amalfi Coast I drank in the sun.
“You’re still looking,” Kat says.
I think:
I’m starting to forget what he looks like and that terrifies me.
I’m grieving a loss that isn’t even mine yet.
I see red everywhere I go and my heart stops.
What I say is:
“Tenet needs him.”