A Phenomenal Affliction

Tommm…Chupp….Tuk tuk tuk….Thuk chup chup chup Sloshhh…. Arizona street, west downtown, block C, third avenue, California. No other noise than the grumble of Mrs. Augustine right outside my apartment would have been any more apposite for me to recognize the city I am in. Too little did I know or, I should probably compose as “was allowed to know”, about the cacophonous babel of the city when I had formerly moved here. Sarah and I would have had a great time perhaps; I wish I knew a little more and a little better. I have not got anyone with me, just a portmanteau and my auburn canary. It’s been three months and twelve days now since the hour I stepped inside this apartment that I can now call mine, so do I suppose. Indeed, just the portmanteau and the canary, that was all I had had back then as well, and a few pence and fivers to seek shelter for that one night when the town seemed as present as any stranger amidst a bustle on paving. I remember the night was long, long enough for me to barge into a motel in pursuit of my life and away from the chase of a mob of bellicose men who were visibly sozzled and beating up whoever came in sight – men, women, kids. I took to my heels both in good time and for good. It was at the vellum canvas that had stood upfront the lavatory where I stumbled upon Sarah’s moccasin, and turned down the mug from my hand right in an alignment with the sole of her right shoe, spilling my mocha on the fingers of her right feet. I had anticipated a diatribe straight away; I had been roughly sailing the whole day anyway. A slap would’ve met the worst of my expectations and sealed the day with coup de grace. “Oh! You spilled your cappuccino on my shoes”, Sarah said, surprisingly drawing a grin on the edge of her lips. Whether I was gratified or astonished, I didn’t know. Both perhaps. “Pardon me, Miss. I was in a hurry. It happened in the rush. I didn’t do it advertently. I will clean it up if you want me to”, I blurted out, taking a step back. She looked at me right into my eyes. Yes, I remember it, the look. Oh, I remember it so well. “Want you to clean it?”, she spoke, bending her head a little low for her eyes to catch mine which was pacing here and there. My mother had once pointed out an anomaly in my behavior which was, in her words, “terribly intolerable”. Elucidating on the flaw I possessed and still do, though, with much severity formerly, she had strived in every possible way to make me understand how offensive it could seem to someone if they were talking to you, and you were averting to even hurl a dekko at them. I don’t know if it was because my mother had caught the spot so specifically or if I was just meant to be incorrigible about it that I could never junk it out of my pristine mannerisms. I wasn’t born with it. No one is. But every time I would fidget, all my efforts and plans I had maneuvered to keep myself from surrendering to the ‘anomaly’ in myself betrayed me in just the blink of an eye, literally in the blink of an eye. I thus, often forbore from blinking whenever an encounter of such sort assailed me, and thus, I tried to not blink when I’d bumped into Sarah. It was all in a blink you see. “Yes?”, She enquired, swaying her head to and fro with mine in the air. The shadow of her body under the lambent hue of the moon that fell on her from the oriel window at the bay on the wayside divulged her movement up front that I was too terrified to see for myself. I knew I had blinked. In spite of all that mental babel within, I’d disobeyed my own instructions once again. I was damn good at that. She didn’t know it, and as expressed formerly, I wish she did. God! I wish she knew that. “Umm… Yes, I can do it. Do you want me to?”, I asked, my eyes still staring at a line of division between two wooden planks below. A black spot came inside the vicinity of my gaze, and I could only detest the vicissitude of that minute more. “Surely you can. But do you want to? Will you, given I assent?”, she further questioned, finding some response from my edge that I believe was intelligible enough for her to continue the colloquy. Having heard her query, I figured she had already consented to me to do it. Then happened yet another event with an electric characteristic of its own that my mind, amidst the mayhem of voices that still resides inside, secures a safe place for. I was moving downwind towards the shelf of toiletries that she held my shoulders and stopped me right there saying “wait wait wait...wait”, and pulled me back to my quondam locus. I couldn’t deny the spark it had sent intravenously straight to my chest. I felt quite irked; I didn’t know how to handle what I was feeling then, I didn’t know if it was normal and if I could allow myself to feel that. I will be drowning in perpetual remorse now had I objected in the slightest. “Do you really want to clean my shoes Mister?”, she inquired, her hands still on my shoulders. “That’s what you want me to do, don’t you?”, I uttered after taking fifteen seconds to breathe in and out and speaking out the last two words barely through my teeth. “NO!”, came her answer straight away. She continued before I could think of anything to come back with, “I never claimed anything. I only asked you. In fact, I had meant it in rhetoric; I don’t want you to clean my shoes. Why will I? It’s just a spillage of some coffee. I can wash it myself.” The grip of her clasp gradually became softer on the edge of my shoulders with the seconds that followed. I sensed the bones of her fingers along the length of my collar bone. It faded just as a feverish temperature departs from the body of someone. I hence grabbed the resuscitation of the normalcy in myself again, and the air was abruptly too cold for my skin; I realized how much she had warmed me up internally. I was terrified at the thought of her noticing it on my face. Not for anything on Earth could I venture to look at her. I was scared as hell. I pressed the tissue inside my left fist until I drenched it with the sweat of my palm and it was a sheer mass of wet threads that were coming undone on the skin of my right hand. I was afraid to divulge any of it, any part of everything I had witnessed in the shot of just an accidental encounter that had lasted for no more than two minutes and forty seconds; indeed I kept a count. How could I not? Strange things happened in life sometimes. I had not the faintest idea of the collision anytime before. I envisioned if she struggled likewise. I wanted to look at her eyes. I knew I would know it then because “Our eyes tell everything, the truth and the truth about a lie”, so as my mother had expounded the reason to establish that my mania was flawed. Undoubtedly, did I ever have the courage to actually do that? “I will get a tissue. I have it in my dorm.”, she said, lifting her hands off my shoulders completely. She was retreating to her erstwhile business that I found myself speaking “Dorm? Do you live here?” “Uh-huh, I do. My stay’s only been past a few months though.”, She spoke and stopped to stare at me askance. She persisted saying, “You look like someone who hasn’t stepped into a tavern his whole life, let alone this place for nothing must be so specifically special about it beyond your anticipation. You look quite sophisticated by the way. Why did you visit us tonight Mister? Any special occasion? You must never imagine yourself in an inn like this in your wildest dreams”, and a chuckle ended her speech. The sound of her laughter fell softly on my ears, and too dulcet was it that my head raised itself, and thereby, the level of my eyes as well. Nothing but her eyes on her face caught mine. She was looking a little elsewhere, but the beauty was in that; I could admire her face secretly for some time, be they only a few moments. I could long an hour to have just those jiffies when I could simply be happy knowing that someone else was looking at me just then. Her coiffure was in vogue and much in resemblance with the ones from the magazines I had read lately, not that I was looking at the hirsute styles of women in them. The chignon was loosely tied at the back of her head in thick tatting. Her ears were bereft of earrings; she was bereft of any jewelry, yet I had never desired any ornament as I desired to be with her then. My stare soon reverted to the lines of division on the wooden deck of the floor below as her gander took back to my visage. “So Mister, do you fancy a demitasse of cappuccino? You wasted it all on my shoe.”, she said, smiling quietly in a whisper. I smiled looking at the floor. I thanked God, acknowledging the fact that the planks of wood my eyes were nearly transfixed on didn’t own the ability of reflection. “I will take your silence for your approval since you haven’t denied the offer and you’re still standing up front; people may not say ‘yes’ quite easily, but a ‘no’ often slips out as if almost involuntarily.”, she continued speaking “Ten ‘o'clock tomorrow, Barrister Vintner Inn, Downtown, 456 B Avenue. And I hate being wistful, just so you aren’t late.” 

 

Perhaps, I have remembered enough. The canary beside my bed cries strident shrieks, being overtly peremptory. I rub my eyes and stare at the ceiling. A strange stillness overwhelms my body. I don’t want to move and just keep staring above. The bulb on the vertex of the ceiling flickers as my vision paces from right to left. I keep looking in the hope of finding a spot, one just like the mania has carved so deeply in my character, but alas! nothing more than white concrete captivates my sight. It’s all very plain – the texture, the paint, the cement as well, all of it. I ponder over everything being so insipid. I ask myself why, but am precisely aware of having empty hands. The plain spectacle, however, entices me to keep staring, all blankly at the walls around the room, at the ceiling right above my head. I can’t deny that I am also no stranger to the verity that the thought is only tantalizing me; there’s nothing on the other side for me to get. Yet, I admit to it, surrendering my grip to whatever the feeling is this time. Honestly, I don’t want to care anymore. So I loosen the force I abstain myself with and continue to stare as the canary hurls a few more petulant squeaks at me. It is easy to lose yourself to the memories that are sweet, the reason being – we don’t get to live them for long; these are the ones in the absolute obverse that are our concomitant places to haunt – the black ones. I think, as I lay supinely on the off white bedsheet of my bed, that it will perhaps, always remain beyond the reach of my comprehension why with all the injuries I am assailed with, all of the wounds that are made to burn afresh on my skin, with pain unfolding itself on my tongue like medicine I can merely detest to taste, I keep going back to these memories that only sojourn my mind and leave me all alone the next moment. Thus, it can be simply reasoned why we keep going back to the former. But they don’t come all sweetly; the poignancy of our having outlived them is what instills the resentment, embittering us with the hours that pass. I close my eyes only to open them once again and stare with that verbatim futility. I close them once more and press my eyelids tightly enough to incur an inflammation on the edge of my eyeballs. I do not want to open them anymore, but the cessation of the canary’s voice summons my shufti all at once. It is then that I observe a crevice at the left-most corner of the front wall in a mauve shade that has been painted on chequers. Through the crevice of the wall, I can behold the cement inside. I take notice of yet another truth that the cement is all the same throughout that wall, throughout the wall that juxtaposes it, and if observed coherently, throughout the entire house, beneath the lamina of paint. I toss towards the right side of the bed. My mind sketches pictures of the bricks that lie underneath the concrete and I wonder if that evinces something, an allegory perhaps. Indeed, an allegory it is. The paint is just an overlay on the coping, to become a rugged surface in a minute or the other. It will be no more than a top of a grid of bricks no one will like to touch very soon. But the bricks construct the crux the wall stands with. I wonder if the cavalcade of life can also suggest a meaning with a similar semblance. I turn my head to the ceiling again and ponder over the possibilities of my having ascertained those bricks in my life. I let the edifice fall too easily even when the bricks were sturdy enough to withstand tempests that we encounter the splashes of time and again. Did I not fight enough? I wonder how far Sarah would go to build her mansion as tall as she always said she would one day.

 

“You look ravishing!”, she said, jeering at me in lieu as she folded the serviette on her lap with her right hand, getting up to leave. I had put on a flannel shirt with a vintage jerkin on whose fringe a puckered smudge had developed like patina does on a floor over time. That explained to me that there was no way I could keep the truth from her that I hadn’t put on the suit in a long time, of course, I knew she would figure that out – it was just a cinch for her eyes that sought to explore every second of the day. I could only strive to keep her sight from noticing the worn-out hem of the garment that I had preferred to rest at the topmost of my entire attire to a grey blazer that Mark had opted for me. The latter was certainly an option, though I couldn’t deny that I was besuited with a suit I had liked since my twenty-fifth birthday when Paul had got it for me. The sound of her grin rather suggested sarcasm. I wanted to see her smile, though, it was almost an intuition that I had accidentally discovered in myself that made me believe that she was beautiful regardless of the face she made. I was too scared to fathom it was love. I knew right then that I was going to have one hell of a week or so just trying to be at ease because I couldn’t help asking myself if it was. The conundrum had already taken shape in my mind, only my heart was left to settle it. “Anything?”, she blurted, breaking into the cascade of my deep contemplation of what I was feeling. Getting my silence in response, she continued to speak, “Is there anything we can begin to converse with? You have been shy since the second we bumped into each other.” I still couldn’t dare to look up at her, although I knew she must look the more gorgeous, and that I wanted to let her have my word of appreciation, I knew it only better. “Alright, tell me how I look.”, she asked, her chuckle precisely audible again. We had walked into the GomLet avenue of Brick Town as the vividly so-called dialogue, more of a monologue followed. I was altering my gaze then as she digressed to the right edge of the wayside. I understood that my deportment was pretty obtrusive and that I was only making it easier for her to find a good reason to ditch me in the middle of the street without any explanation for I could clearly evaluate the reason very well myself. As she traversed along the other direction, I, for one jiffy, pondered if she had already forsaken me. Speaking with probity, that would have saddened me in a way that I would have, in no route, being able to escape feeling. But now I wish she had. “Here, butterscotch cornet”, she avowed, coming out from behind my back. “Thank you.”, I whispered, recovering from the shock she had once again bestirred me with by being too vivacious for me. “Thanks to you that you uttered two complete syllables. Anyway, here comes our next destination –Patisserie Plaza! Voile!”, she screamed with a cheerfulness that the ‘intuition’ inside my mind could tell was pristine in her. We stepped up the stile and the next moment, she held my left hand with her left and pulled me up to the foyer. The spark had stampeded my entire system once again. I felt an ecstatic inrush gush straight into my blood, making me perspire all of a sudden. “Shall we?”, she said, turning her face towards me. It wasn’t my intuition that had foretold me that she was going to look at me; it was my heart that had. My mother’s words echoed in my ears once again, and right underneath the nightlight in a vaguely lunar ambiance where the gleam of the moon at the early evening had hurled a translucent glisten on the pavement where both our feet juxtaposed each other, I wanted to fulfill the desire of beholding a single glimpse of her face. It was half-past six, and stupidly, I had to remind that to myself simply because I was dithering not knowing what to do. I was an explosion of fireworks inside and it was blithering ecstasy, I could surely tell. I felt the skin of her palm on my wrist, and the desire of looking into her eyes whilst our skins still touched intensified by a soupcon of an extent. I wondered if her eyes would sparkle. An obvious certainty as it had always been in all our lives with reference to the happenings both weird and blasé that befell this Earth, it was a fact well known by me that there was no other way than to actually collate enough courage within myself and act to see what I so badly wanted to. I knew the feat wouldn’t be bereft of its repercussions. The addiction would be ineluctable too, but I was desperate to have both our eyes meet each other, just for once, not to mention that I was captivated already.

I straighten my back after getting up on the bed but do not leave it completely. The canary is quiet again. I partially leave the bed to check on it, only to discover it is fast asleep. I do not bother the cage and forebear my hands before they can touch it. The sweet sleep of the bird is special to me. Even as it is kipping, it never fails to reflect a feature of Sarah’s countenance. I observed her face closely on the night when I had asked her for her hand. The night was cold and the blizzard was basically the cause of it. I was polite enough to not scare her away. I am always terrified by the thought of it because I have had both a good long and prolix History of having people in my life and not having them the next moment. The isolation is lethal. I had seen it from so close a perspective that I was scared as hell to fall prey to it once again, for I also didn’t have my mother to deride my presage strides anymore. Indeed, who would halt me from conceding with what had been conjured to be my fate and keep me alive? But the moment I saw those eyes as our hands remained clasped, the lambent flicker of the moonlight was reflected on the black of her eyes. And with a dazzling shade of the pale cerulean liner she had sketched a strip over her eyelids with, they had seemed to me as a night sky drenched in azure. Amidst the dust of cosmetics on her cheeks, the sparkle shone brightly naturally, and I knew there was something that just made me smile, shoving aside all of my symptoms of being somewhat differently wired inside. She made it so easy without even seeing me at my worst as if she had known me all her life. Thus, following the end of that night, I ventured to ask “Why did you stick around when I was verily infuriating you in every way I could? Was it mere sufferance or pity? I don’t wish to have either.” She chucked my chin, left my hand to cross hers on the frontal part of her chest, and in staccato bursts of an utterance, spoke each syllable distinctly like nothing in my life had ever been spoken of hitherto – “Good for both of us; it was neither of the two. I didn’t stick around. You didn’t talk much, but that’s what bandies the tacit beauty of the words that aren’t heard. I surmise I should tell you what gratified me the most about your company – your strange gesture of letting me hold your hand every time I wanted to. I believe I owe you an explanation for the same because they were not only my hands but yours too. Your allowance to let me hold your hand bereft of any objection evinced that you wouldn’t mind when I would want to have you and be reluctant enough to reason why. You will still stick around if I’ll ask you to, and wouldn’t press on the matter until I’ll want to divulge it myself. Surprisingly, I found it beautiful to know that I would actually want to tell you all about the matter at some time or the other, without having you leave me at my rock bottom. And I surely would, by memory, confide in you while you would just let the situation be in the moment, and love the touch of my hands only a little more.” I had heard the words of the lovers in books of fantasy and sometimes, in a real milieu as well. I had never really been so good at delving deep into the syntax, only the lexical beauty would have my penchant often. I always cared less to bother about the rest that would also be laid out right beside those words, you see, nothing had ever hexed my brain as the words of the lovers which always sounded the same, read the same – “It is that; it is that moment for me to capture”. I figured it was the jiffy when, despite not having nurtured such predilection for some words spoken out into the thin air, I got to say just that. The air felt colder on my skin as she neared the parapet of the bridge we were walking on then, enhancing the distance between us. I wanted to stop her from going further; my desperation was reaching the zenith of my tolerance and I felt like giving in to the demand. I knew that would be my feat where I would be giving up and be only happier. I wished the second she had ended her answer would screech to a halt, and she would never have to end saying. Yachts were avowing the nuptial retirement on the Hooligan beach that abutted the bridge. She ran ahead of me as I stared a little above the customary level of my sight, too scared to only find abandonment once more, only in an entirely different context. She stopped at a distance of a few feet up front, and for me to note for sure, turned around and ran back to where I stood. Too dejected had I been to ever envision anything like that happening to me; no one had ever really come back to me after leaving me on my own. It was a truth for me to live when my mom had done just that - left me with this ailment of mine when I had only been six years old and never came back. I had learned to give up on expecting returns of any and every kind then. It took some time for me to accept that she had rendered me aloof to have another family, knowing that I would exist at the same time too. And to tell you with honesty, I could only engulf the incident with time than accept it actually. Perhaps, the affliction was somewhere inside me; you see, I never actually digested it in any way. I was too craven to indulge in handling the mess. I had a reason for that – I always thought I shared the mess with her. It wasn’t the only mine but ours. I didn’t want to tackle it all by myself. I could not. I was undeniably capable of a defeat without her. Sarah stood in front of my face which faced downwards. I knew that she was staring at my face, the ‘intuition’ again. Taking my head in the palms of both her hands, she raised my head to make it behold her. The floodlight from the midfield behind the tatting of her hair shone vividly from her back, and the light shone like an incandescent glow of innocence, reminding me of Charlie’s Sam. What would I have given to have a friend who could love you and still only be your friend, let alone summon the affliction that came as the price of real love; I wondered if I had found one. “You should know that you can look at me.”, she said, chucking my chin again. She had figured out that I liked it when she fondled me. If only she knew how much I liked it as much amidst our squabbles with teeth and claws as I did during every second of our pillow talks, something will be different now.

                     

I toss and turn on the bed. I want to get up and then I don’t. But I am not working out that dilemma right now; I am barely putting some effort into it. The bed has her smell. I do not want to leave it hence. But the fragrance isn’t all a rose’s. Ah! How I prayed back then and how I can’t help praying now, only a little differently and in a context that was always untoward for me. So little was I aware of what had already awaited me in the future? If I’d known, I would have never let her touch me for once. The day wasn’t far from that night when she was going to unravel my real countenance that was so “damn flawed”, so as everyone had always told me. I am autistic. Indeed, they forewarned me to be careful before considering a step as marriage. I couldn’t consent any more to that, I never had. But Sarah didn’t belong to ‘them’. Even if too clichéd as it may sound in the voice of a lover for someone he dearly loved, she was somewhat different from the rest. I cannot say that she was peerless, but certainly ‘differently wired’ like me. She actually looked into the labyrinth of the ugly mess inside me, and still decided to deal with that shit. How could I not fall? I witnessed the voices of ‘them’ fade inside my mind for the first time. She made me see my core again and I didn’t dislike it for the very first time. It was just like receiving a new life or, resuscitating from a stasis. It was no therapy, but true love. She made me reconsider my dejection, and realize that I also mattered for someone; she made me feel loved like I was precious enough for her to ever give me up like everyone else before her had. I saw a new route to trudge on, and for the first time in my whole life, I also had a hand to hold while treading down the paving. Sarah brought the magic from the pages of my childhood audacity into existence. She was my Sarah. It is blasphemous to call her my girl because she was my messiah. The night of our fracas will thus, surely never leave my head. It was all so petty and ludicrous for us to have a trivial wrangle over a matter of that sort. 

“Sarah, I disapprove of anyone showing their backs at me when I question. I want an answer”, I said, my voice acerbic. Sarah had returned home late again and refused to dine together as soon as I greeted her on the doorstep. The air in the house had been quite new lately, and I didn’t know if I liked it. She preferred to retire to bed and had shown no gesture of a good wife recently. She hadn’t slept with me for three weeks, and was always ingenious to concoct a reason or two to avert my barrage of queries; moreover, “I am tired honey” was always at the tip of her tongue as the staple reason she would so often cite that it was absolutely blasé, and revealed that it was all sheer lie. “Sarah! We aren’t done. Come and dine with me right now. As your husband, I deserve to demand this much.”, I said, holding her left hand by the wrist. “Wilstern, honey I am…”, she was composing the usual lie that I heckled her. “That you are tired. I know that. In fact, that’s what I have known for days now. I feel like you’re growing distant from me. Have I done something wrong? You must tell me.” She stood in silence. This time, her head was bowed down. I had seen myself stand with my head low a million times, and had scrounged the hindmost caliber inside to know when one’s head was down inevitably and when owing to shame. I had held my head low with both and could sense the reason just by looking at the person standing. The worse adjunct to complement my assessment of her pose was the fact that Sarah was also quiet. “Sarah, what is it?”, I whispered, making my voice as dulcet as I possibly could by shoving all the fury aside and moving close to her. “I…Wilstern, I have something to…”, she ceased speaking as she saw my face. Very strangely again, my intuition was at the utmost of its work and I knew that she didn’t want to disappoint me. The cessation in her response thus, suggested that she had already had. “Something to confess. I had been planning to say it, but it was never the right time dear.”, She continued, wiping her face with the handkerchief that I had stitched for her in calico fabric on the first birthday that she had celebrated with me following our marriage. Finding no sign of response from my edge, she carried on, “I have been seeing someone else.” Just in the face of it, I was doomed to admit that the tasteless truth of my life yet which tasted so bitter in tandem that I had lost it again; just in the face of it. I was under the compulsion again, once again to let it all go. The magic, the electricity of the touch, the sparks of an entire night sky in the small confinements of only two eyes, oh how I lost it in the second that had taken her to unfold what I had never been a stranger to, and in fact, had rather been the most complacent and orthodox acquaintance with. It fascinated me how the pain still pricked afresh. It was one of the most naked facets of the cruelty of pain that it always disguised itself, and despite your cognizance of its essence just enough to know what it is, it still came, draped in a façade of the most exquisite sensation your skin could ever desire anything more palpable than, all done to make you house it all by yourself. You see how it is, you never can tell because you never really know. “Wilstern”, she said, approaching me, lifting her right hand to touch my face. I stood with a dumb mouth. I allowed her to touch me because it was going to be for the last time. I took her hands after she had placed her right one on my left cheek, and kissed them, planting my lips delicately on her skin. I put them away as soon as the tears came out of my eyes. I didn’t want her hands to be drenched with them. She had turned out to be just one of them. I could only cry for myself and be mad as hell for loosening the hold on what I had composed as my ultimate conviction that I was never to be loved. It had taken both years of grief and guts of the kind I had thought my system could never embody. But I had ascertained them both and let go of all my achievements for her, only to be injured again. And for the entirety, I knew how to keep my tears to myself - the low bow of my head was my source of recourse. It turned out to be my savior sometimes. As it had been foremost, my head was down again, except that the floorboard was a little worn out in the house. She had pestered me time and again to fix the bolts and the nails on the flooring. I wondered if I could look at that part of the past to keep as a memory. With this lousy head of mine, I couldn’t really think of anything of the past that would shelter us both otherwise with something that might help us to fall in love again. There would perhaps, be nothing that she would want back because she wouldn’t want to keep anything as such – let alone summon the affliction that came as the price of real love, remember? “Wilstern, please say something.”, She spoke through her tears. “I am wondering if my fixing these doorknobs would fix my heart.”, I said, with every word distinct. My tears had ceased to pour, so I didn’t add that I was also wondering why I wasn’t in tears when the ache inside my chest was as present as I was in the moment. “Wilstern, I am…”, She was speaking through her lament that I interrupted her for one last time because my intuition had also functioned for the last time, and I knew that she wanted to apologize. “Don’t. Your heart has only stopped feeling for me the same way as it used to. You see, you are not to be blamed, Sarah. This is love, real as it is, painful it has to be. The rest remains the same – your body, my body; your face, my face; your hands, my hands; your eyes, my eyes. The difference, however, is definite in our skins, in our lineaments, in our touch, in our sight when we may behold each other some other time at some other place, in everything that we both actually shared. I see. I hope you too can see that the dearth of change also corroborates its presence. Ah! What an irony, isn’t it Sarah? We can never really love someone so much as to erase all the possibilities of being hurt. It’s bitter, but it is just a part of this cascade of the process that we see as a relationship. ‘They said, “the affliction only strengthens the tie more.” Indeed, that is overtly true. Tighter the knot, stronger it is, but so does it also aggravate the infliction inside and tweaks your body so much, and thereby, the desire to undo the tie. Such a traumatic paradox, isn’t it? It is how it attains a phenomenal stature in one’s mind I reckon. The rest stays the same just as the world does. There is no other change I can find in here, can you?” 

                                             

The bedsheets look grubbier than yesterday. I told you, but the fragrance wasn’t all a rose’s. It stings no worse than a stench now - repulsive, malodorous, and repugnant. The hour of her departure was evidently harsh on me, but her departure from the world following the crash of her car a few days following the former struck me the most. Verily did Vonnegut write in The General in His Labyrinth “How will I ever get out of this labyrinth?” The crash occurred near Bystreet Avenue, a residence I haven’t since dared to visit. How queer was the hour of the avowal of her death that I could only be assailed by yet another irony - her sleep at peace sought mine from these eyes. I can never be at peace now, not even beyond death. Perhaps, I will never quite understand how I get these paradoxes and ironies to find their ways to me. It’s hard for me to accept for no irony worked in the arena of my search for someone who would never leave me. Sarah has now left me forever, and fate killed the chance that that second had had of making us bump into each other in a pub again. I did not attend her cortege; I did not want to say goodbye to the only person on Earth who had somehow been sad to leave me. I only have these sheets that bear the touch of her skin. I lie down again, facing the fresco on the edges of the ceiling, and staring blankly out of the window as the cool swish of a zephyr invisibly enters my bedroom. “Yes, I miss you”, I whisper. There is no change in the intensity of the wind; it stays all the same because it is from the neighborhood of what Sarah and I once dwelled in together. Nothing comes from what we had in between us; it is the rest of the world. Nothing changes. I see Mr. Hockshima coming out of the house to trim the plants of his garden, a distinctly massive chisel in his left hand while a basket with reticulated grids rests on the other. I get out of bed. The canary shrieks again. I open the birdcage and taking the canary by her feet on the index finger of my right hand, say “I know, I know. It’s time for your brunch Sarah” as I head to the pantry.