On Innocence.

Have you seen a summer frangipani. One that blooms just after spring? It is a miracle of form and life sciences. It sheds all its leaves. Patiently, without a hint of emotion, taking off every single leaf that it wore through the year. Unabashedly displaying its anorexic structure. Strong in places. Knobbly in some, lean, accusing and aspiring in others. You wonder why it would stand still like this, shorn of its natural baggage, why it would last skeleton-alone, and then you see at the tips of its giant finger-like accusation, bunches of furiously blushing flowers. Fragrant and bold, and yet under that exhibitionism, a blush that is hesitant, stopping at half a petal. The waxen, flagrant frangipani. That is innocence.

*****

Watch with the sun in your eyes, a little girl of three. Four, maybe. Not quite a baby but not quite grown enough for the word to be inappropriate. Watch as she climbs with uncoordinated hands and legs up a slide, completely graceless, completely serene. She is unaware, and sweetly uncaring, of the impatient kids who queue up behind her. There's a mini storm brewing behind her of children's bursting, cyclic energy waiting to explode at the top where they let go, and plummet gleefully on the slide. There's queue of scorn and good upbringing behind her, a temptation to push her aside, even over, maybe. A serpent of impatience and cruelty waiting just so that she is done with her slow turn on her hands and they can all have their quick thrill.

The girl climbs on, unaware what's going on behind her, body bending to the demands of the ladder that she just cannot tame under her wayward hands and legs. Her face shows no fear, only a heartbreaking earnestness towards her task. She knows not that other children do it better than her. That those behind her are like her in size, shape, age and impatience. She knows not that she will not have their empathy. Her foot slips. There's a barely-suppressed groan from behind her, as the serpent gets ready to strike with the venom of unkind words, the kind you find only in playgrounds of children. But she's a star. She has not let that hurry her into climbing like it would an adult. She climbs only like she knows how. And suddenly, just when the snake-kids behind her are at snapping point, she is at the top. The sun is setting and you can't see her face. Only the glorious silhouette she's become, the gold of a setting sun tattooing its gentle fire all around her little form, trying to confine her in its soft-filter picturesqueness. Except the sunlight didn't account for her hair; it's a mess and plays with the breeze, collecting the sun's fire from her outline and sending it away in waves from the top of her head, like a well-meaning baby Medusa of light.

She's up there and because her face is hidden in the light, you can only imagine her smile, the gently raised cheekbones of her pure face the only clue. A smile that comes from anticipating that cold sweep to the earth, releasing every little fear and embarrassment she boldly hid in her heart. In that brilliant moment, she starts to sit down and the summer cotton of her frock billows all around her in a perfect umbrella. The breeze collaborates with her victory climb and the umbrella is a poster for all that is innocent about her. Despite it being there only for a second, because it is there only for a second before she sits down, and decides to claim fruit of her journey by taking a tiny, exciting ride down, down, down to the earth. She, as the axis of her one-second umbrella, too is innocence.

*****

My grandmother, a woman of love, humour, music, bad teeth and temper lost most control of her arms and legs due to a particularly bad case of spondylosis. In time, she was confined to her bed and her room. She ate there, watched tv there, read books there. She saw visitors there. She ate her apple there. Drank her coffee there.

Her skin was smooth, like a tautly-stretched, moist balloon once it has burst. When she would eat something that needed to be picked up with her hands, I would watch her. Her hand made a slow, heavy, waving descent to the bowl she intended to pick up her piece of apple, or orange, maybe banana, from. When it touched the bowl, it would rest. A limb in thought. Her fingers with taut, smooth, honey skin would stretch like a scared little ET and try to pick up a piece of fruit. The sneaky old piece would shift just when she got a grip on it, leaving a minuscule pool of nectar in is place. Her hand would try again, lifting like a dumb giant and dropping back into the bowl. My grandmother had no will against this recalcitrant limb. The fruit would behave itself this time, recognising the limitations of the bowl it was in. Yet, elfin by nature, it would slip out again to hide between other pieces of fruit. Third time lucky. She would have the fruit between her exquisitely awkward fingers and the slow rise to her mouth would start. Sometimes, she won, some times the piece of fruit, finding its freedom in the folds of her starched upper cloth. The days she won, I watched her gnawing slowly, laboriously at her fruit and when she had a few satiating bites of it, she would turn to me a give me a big smile. I have never seen anything more innocent.

*****
Sometimes you look into the mirror and all you see is everything you've become. The faces you put on for people, all you. Different parts of you. Even when you cry, it's a face. One that you gaze at through your pain, despite your pain to look for aesthetics. Are you beautiful when you cry. Those days when you smile at your reflection and you can't see anything right with it, those days you make faces like you were a child, tongue out, nostrils flared; indelicate, ugly and utterly free. Suddenly, one day, there's no face to put on, no tears to wipe delicately, no bad teeth to look at you smile, no faces to make, and you've had enough sleep, you've eaten well and there's nothing that happened the day whole day that has made it exciting. An absence of the mean, a presence of the cognisant. You are perfectly ordinary. And that does not make you sad. Look again in that mirror. Because, that too, is innocence.

Ghost words

Her nose touched his; he could barely see the colour of her autumn-leaf eyes, their faces were that close. What he could see was the tide of tears in those eyes, a gentle swell, rose-veined from no sleep, from some more crying, and then a rolling leap off the cliff of her lashes; tears finally struggling for space between his fingers where he held her face and her skin, in an effort to seek the maze of her ear. Their bodies were weightless as they lay there, clothed, one on top of the other, touching head to toe, weighed down by love and unbearable heaviness of an impending end. "I am not leaving you. I am just going away. No?" he asked in a tone so tender, so full of love that there was nothing left in the world but this, nothing but them and their love.

The lie brought a smile to her and opened up the stream of her tears, where earlier they were a mere trickle. You see, then she believed it was the absolute truth. She knew he would ever lie to her. Maybe he never did. Maybe he just changed his mind. But isn't that a lie too? Changing your mind?

They kissed then forgetting the difference between hunger, spit and tears. They all tasted the same in her mouth, and his too. Probably. Everything that usually followed their kiss followed; they made love, they cooked, he fed her, she dangled her feet off the kitchen counter watching him move around the kitchen, she telling little stories. What did they talk about, she wondered. What did they talk about before they argued, she corrected. Everything and nothing. As much of a cliche that was, it was true. That's what love does to you, she said. It gives you the capacity to endlessly talk about everything; suddenly you have stories you've never told. Suddenly, just as the conversation started ("You mean to say apple juice has no sugar?") it also ends and then there are only kisses and sighs; moans and screams, depending on whether you're a screamer in bed, whether you're a screamer when you argue.  Silence is rare, because even when you're asleep, your breath is getting in each other's way. Your long hair tickles and you are far too polite to pull away that stuck, numb, pins-and-needles hand from between two resting bodies.

But sleep was always beautiful, she remembered. He'd twitch -- toes, fingers, elbow, knee -- before his body would finally settle down to satiated, protective sleep, an arm around her. She'd rock gently between sleep and wakefulness, waiting for the arm that held her to fall aside as he slept deeper. A completely futile exercise because not once did his arm go slack, releasing her from the warm enclosure of their bodies. But sleep came to her rarely. She willed it away because she didn't want to miss him when she fell asleep.

She smiled at that thought. Some times, sleep had gently rested on her and she had woken up by his waking. And yet, she'd pretend to be asleep just so that they wouldn't have to end this. So they didn't have to go their own way when this was done because going away meant debilitating. Like that cheesy song, every time she left him, she left bits of herself with him. Sometimes her kisses, sometimes her breath. Sometimes all the love she could carry in her heart. Other times her energy, her excitement, her wetness. Yet other times, her wallet, her keys, her earrings. He took as much as he gave. Or maybe just a little less.

As she lay in the dark a thousand times more, on the same sofa, after that tearful afternoon, imagining their weightlessness, their heaviness of parting, she willed herself to hear that voice again. "I am not leaving you." Most days she heard the voice, she heard the strength it took for him to say that to her, knowing he was wrong, not knowing he was lying. But as time passed, just like with the noise of the world around her, the voice began fading. Until it became a ghost of the words that were said, until, like ghosts, she doubted they'd been said at all.

Black

There's a little red eye flashing somewhere between the ceiling and the middle of the wall where my head touches. Closer to the ceiling. Flashing and red, assuring a room full of expectation that everything is cool. I sit alone in the corner, in the darkness, always in the corner in the beautiful perfect three-lined L that corners make. I crouch, a mouse afraid of anything that moves, capable of making afraid anything that moves. I crouch and no one comes in. I spend an eternity in the cold not being able to decide if it will be the moment I move that someone might come along into this beautiful perfect white square that my room is, to look for clothes, to find a handbag, to take their clothes off and subject me to their very terrible humanity, their ageing nakedness; all sagging skin, and breasts and creased dark  elbows. Ageing without their minds wanting to. Ageing without enough cremes in the world to stop it. And I still quiet in a corner, my stiff, creepy swishing tail watching all this. Were I a man, someone would call me lucky. But I am a woman. No. I am rat. Afraid of everything that comes in; making afraid everything that comes in.

Who but a rat knows the endlessness of darkness, the furtive, fragile comfort of it? Darkness as nothing as clouds, darkness that shatters, implodes and disappears completely with the thinnest gash in its armor. I know it well this darkness. And I choose to break it sometimes. I sit in a corner, sniffing the air, acutely aware than another human being can come, make a cruel click on the wall and make this womb in which I rest go away.

I break this darkness sometimes. I open the door of light against the dough-softness of darkness and sit down to release everything that's gathering in me. I use words, so exquisitely painfully, so acutely carefully for the fear of using an ordinary word, making a pedestrian sentence. Nothing wrong with that I suppose but that is not who I wish to be. I am not happy with every day. On those days, nothing satisfies. And everything is wrong. And I don't have enough clothes and it's been ages since I've been held at night. Games don't go well and I cannot do what my one true love wants. Those days are blotched ink days, days when, if I decided to race with myself, I would lose by a whole 50 meters. Those days are also the days when I can hear the blood coursing through my veins, the days I feel my coffee machine head is way too small to hold everything that's frothing there to come out, the days I feel like there is a second brain there telling me to end that sound of blood coursing because silence is comforting and honest. And one can sleep in darkness.

At the edge of darkness, is also the edge of the universe. Where I can step off that cliff and fall into Permanence. If this room is temporary, this darkness Transient, then the pouring-chocolate abyss I fall into, without light or wings, is Permanence. I haven't tried stepping off because I imagine it feels a bit like going mad. That if you take one more step, the mesh-bag full of marbles that your life is will inexplicably tear and all the spherical, perfectly flawed elements of your life will scatter. And you, the bag, torn and gaping, like the Earth dug for progress, stand helpless. You can't reach your hands out and gather them, close that gaping hole in your life and remember how many marbles you had so don't have to replace them with a make-do one.

Who do you think, then, holds the bag?

Seek

With the summer, you come. As irregular as my period, as sure as an unexpected pregnancy. Always you. Just when I think you've forgotten all about me; when I think I've forgotten all about you. How long will you stay this time? A week? A year? A promised lifetime that will surely be struck down by the cancer that we are?

But first, sit down, let's have a drink. You must be tired from looking for me. I am not easy to find, they say, being one of a kind and all. And yet you find me, every single time. Whether I am wed to one man or loving another; whether I move to the city by the sea or hide up in the mountains where the mist becomes my breath: my entire being hoping the fog, the hated cold and the river sounds hide me completely. Through all of these wondrous escapes, you find me.

Do I leave a trail like Hansel? One that's not just bread crumbs. What are my telltale signs? My famed belief in ESP or the fact that I send you a postcard from wherever I go, but without a return address and from at least two towns away? Is that how you find me?

You like my postcards, you said once. You liked my uneven, irregular, pretending-to-be old fashioned handwriting. It is old fashioned, you finally said, because I write in cursive. And you find that strange, that something so intrinsic about me is old fashioned. Did you miss, genius, that I send postcards? When was the last time you received one from someone other than me? I am old fashioned; I believe in loving forever, no matter how many times it takes to reach that forever, I love each of those people for the rest of my life, and theirs. Sometimes, even after because they're so much more dearer when they are dead. I believe in thank-you notes and paying a visit to ill friends and relatives. I believe in carrying flowers to someone's home if I am going there the first time. I believe in apologising if I've rudely interrupted someone. As I should now. I am sorry, you came all this way to tell me something, as always. What was it?

How do I know you've come all this way? Your shoes are clean, your fingernails freshly clipped and the first thing you reached for when I offered you a drink is beer. If you had just come past two neighborhoods your shoes would wear the film of dust of a short walk and you wouldn't have bothered with your finger nails because they wouldn't have been dirty in the first place. Ah, you still smile at my basic Holmesian deductions, I see. You know, I could make these silly assumptions all my life, sitting across the table, making a complete, but, you'll agree, pretty ass of myself just to see you smile the way you do. I can barely ever tell what that smile is like. All I know is it is the smile I expect to see every few years when I know I've forgotten about you and you have forgotten about me.

But I digress. And hijack your time. Why are you here?

"To hear you talk," you say? Well, your timing couldn't have been more perfect. I've been married three years now and I've had a lot of time to gather enough that I could talk to you about. Where do I begin, though? Shall I tell you the mundane, the everyday and inevitable? Like this little life growing in my body, swelling my body in ways I don't recognise. Let me tell you about that. Have you been around a pregnant woman since you left the last time, or ever, for that matter? They're far from anything remotely maternal, I tell you. Or maybe the way they are is what maternal is about? Growling, restless, demanding and ready hide at the smallest hint of danger. Or being called fat. We are happy most of the time, but boy, you've got to be inside our heads to know how much it takes to enjoy this without consistently reminding yourself that there's no going back. The baby's got to pop.

Oh you didn't notice? Here, let me show you. Place your palm right there and see if the little one will be friends with you. It needs to be -- I don't know if it's a boy or a girl, so "it" it shall be. I'd like it to be friends with you, after all you're probably going to appear at its fourth birthday and I am not going to be able to explain who you are. "Friend" would mean she'd leave you alone, and if I said my heart, she'd want to know why it was walking outside of my chest. That's an idea, huh? Why are you walking around outside my chest and disappearing for years together? Aren't you supposed to be right here, pumping blood into my life, helping me choose the crib and losing yourself to the darling blanket? Well, never mind the sentimentality. Feel the baby, feel how I want to hide you when I want to protect you from the world, tight and secure in my womb, not breathing yet living, safe and warm and liquid. That's what I want for you when I want to save you.

So, hear me talk. You're leaner this time, but you've always been thin. No, sinewy and yet trim, whipcord slim, not thing. No obvious muscles and yet unbounded strength when dragging me across the road to cross it or lifting boxes into the truck the time I left town because you said you needed space. And the telltale signs of your smoking have disappeared. I guess I should be happy for you that you've given up, except I am not. I liked stepping out with you for a cigarette. To watch the distance at which your feet were placed, to wave the smoke away from me as if it offended me, even as I blew my tobacco clouds at you. I hope you knew it's just that I didn't like my hair and clothes to smell of smoke. I am a lady, you know, and old fashioned at that. All this cooking for yourself is making you look taller than your tall. I have to really reach up, and look at the sun if I have to find the rich bark of your eyes. They're still the same, those eyes. Always promising, always lying, always full of love for me. And that is why I open my door for you every time you come. Your promises are like a drink of good whisky. I take my time over it, the flavours, the smoke, the colour, the gentle swirl of words that is water. And I get sufficiently drunk, the first of it going to between my legs, to my core, warming me up from there to the very tips of my toes and fingers. When I wake up in the morning, though, I am hungover, and your whisky promises are replaced by wooly-headed lies that you speak. A gentle, groggy untrue reminder of last night's grand plan-making.

But when you leave, and you always leave, in a day or two; or even a week, you always leave me with love in  your eyes. And that takes me through the next few years, I pack that in my baggage when I pack to hide, to run, taking out tiny bits of it like precious, expensive chocolate that I am greedy for, an avarice of the soul but only eat bit by excruciating bit so it lasts me till... I don't know when. Because I never know when you'll turn up at my door, freshly clipped nails, clean shoes and a heart full of dross that you collected looking for me, just as we have almost forgotten about each other.


*****