Pictures of her standing in
the middle of my room, hands on her hips, continue to drain the empty spaces of
my dreams. Knowing as she always does, better than I, where I’d left my keys,
my wallet, my spectacles, the mosquito bat. With a bottle of water in one hand, she’d pull
a chair, and legs stretched, watch me work, while I, her legs.
That is her, waiting at the
bill counter at the supermarket, trying to verify in her head if she had
borrowed the right number to get the subtraction right. Simple math, I’d
snigger. She will pretend she convinced me that she was ignoring me. I will let
her assume she won.
She scares me with the amount
of detailing she structures me with in her eye - the subtle nuances in my
gestures, tones and very presence that she had so carefully, so fervently
memorized over the years she stayed silent. The intensity knocks me off guard. And
pretending to hold a deaf ear to it gets harder each time, it is almost
infuriating.
Only when I wonder if it is
time to throw her off the ground she was acclimatizing to, she holds her gaze
with me for an instant too long, piercing me into every moment of co-existence she
had breathed life into, without trying, without expecting. Nothing was ever on
the platter, nothing had ever been.
For one, my t-shirt looked
different on her, helping her flaunt her collarbone and everything. She had gotten
into that frenzy last summer, when one by one, my favourite t-shirts went
missing, one of each colour.
Last summer, when she sat in
the garden and scalded her leg, pouring boiling hot tea, as she shamelessly
gaped at the Vaseline on my lips, open-mouthed; no, I will not tell you what a
man was doing with Vaseline.
The fool is, in all
probability, writing something about me this very minute, I am sure. If only
she would direct them at someone who can possibly reciprocate it all and
reciprocate it well. And leave me alone and make me lie to her yet again that I
do not miss her, that I do not miss yelling at her to wake up while I catch
that extra fifteen minutes of sleep – sleep that was never that precious as
those stolen peaceful minutes. Sleep, that she probably let go while ruffling
my hair and secretly counting the number of grays, the knowledge of which she was
sure to shove into my face when I least expected it.
She is now looking at
something new, somewhere, and mentally making a note to describe it to me,
telling herself that she would floor me with the idea. And I already know I will
scoff it off, if only to see her rage in fury and call me names. She sucked at
it as much as she did with the numbers.
I’ll be on my way now,
thinking of her fake-punching me with all her might, with a messed up head that
refuses to work when I get her anger up and simmering. I’ll be on my way home, where
my clothes smell of her and where she belongs with me - she just can never know.
