All our loves write upon us. Our body is their graffiti wall, our heart their Post-It, our soul their personal diary. The tattoos are invisible but it’s indelible ink. Seven years ago, I saw first proof of this in A, after the heartbreak with C. I saw for the first time how a person unraveled, fragmented, disintegrated until their DNA helixes with the floating sugar-phosphate backbone were the only upright things within them. I followed A like a shadow, tried to gather the pieces that were strewn with callous casualness never wanting to be found again, said ‘Enough’ when the drinking got so much that table-tops turned into dancing floors and snide knowing laughter followed us like a ruthless horde of bees. I held back A’s hair through the nausea of self-disgust on mornings after black nights of sex with strangers. I watched. In pain. In vain.
After the storm came the calm. A finally talked. And I learnt my first lesson of love. Over Bacardis with lime for me and Vodka martinis for A. Shaken stirred and shattered. Love kills you. Then resuscitates you into something else. A blend of you and your lover. A plus C. The CPR of life. You’re never whole again. Because two pieces are ripped off, and two new ones attached. Two pieces of the one person you want to escape, the two cells you want to shed more than anything in the world. But they are now embedded within you. Tainting you forever. And you are now a venomous cocktail of love. A was never the same again. Never laughed the same, never cried the same. Never talked the same, never thought the same. I cried for the loss. And told myself – naively, oh so naively – I’d never allow this to happen to me.
I’d known G from the time we were both kids, we grew up together. Cool-headed, rational, sensible G. None of the volatile, impulsive, edgy fire that characterized A. G was A’s antithesis. Or so it seemed. Until M walked out on G. And I watched another erosion. Another subtraction and another addition. It could’ve been the same movie. A and G, they both bled. Until the floor turned black and their hearts went white. And I learnt something again. I saw how power corrupts. The power that you give someone. Or that someone gives you. The temptation is irresistible, you want to use it. M did just that. Played with the power that G gave away so easily, so simply. Wasn’t M’s fault. It was there to be used. Don’t we do that sometime or the other? Make someone cry because we know we can make them and they will. Say those words that we know will hurt. Press all the right or wrong buttons and sit back to watch the play with idle, interested curiosity. The perverse pleasure of power. G changed too. And again I decided – naively, oh so naively – never me, never ever me.
S was the frailest, the most vulnerable person I’ve known. Not a single section of S was unrecorded, no part was blank. Too many had written on, too many had taken away and too many had left their pieces. I don’t think S recalls ever being whole. So afraid was S of walking away from H and probably losing the last two pieces that were S’s own that pain after pain, infidelity after infidelity, hurt after hurt went unresolved, just absorbed. Until S walked in one day and I saw one giant throbbing sore, a grieving mass of unbelonging pieces, haphazardly held on. A glue of tears and fears. S laughed – gently, sadly – at my declarations, ‘You will never be me’. Wise knowing S.
Many years have passed now. And I’ve been slashed in red ink. Not too many writers, but the writings cover every square inch. I’m no longer bare, unadorned. I’ve been removed from, added to. Until I cannot tell from the cauldron within where I end and my past or present begins. Experience has taught me, like everyone else, a lot about love. But my understanding of it remains as distorted as a dyslexic’s performance at a Spelling Bee. And I learnt another lesson. You’re not written on only after the death of a love/ lover. The scribbling, the nibbling away happens from the beginning, through the entire period of love. Which is probably why people who’ve been in love and lived together for years and years seem like mirror images of each other. One’s pieces have been grafted onto another. A ridiculous face/off of cells, sloughing into each other.
Older, wiser, today I watch E plunge hopefully into a new relationship, after things ended with Z. Watch the phases of powerfulness and powerlessness carry E through and I wonder why we seek love so desperately, with such frantic recklessness. I had done just what E did. Sought love to heal the pain of love. Perhaps the most idiotic solution – cutting your hand and drawing blood to heal the bleeding in your leg. But we all seem to do that, we keep going back for more. We even have a sardonic word for it – rebound. So, are we all masochists? Or just hopeless optimists?
A drunk evening with my closest buddies and our alcohol-loosened tongues fearlessly talk. Of lovers. And love. Theories abound. Past amours are dissected, analysed, compared, rated. We all agree that it feels good. Talking about those that were, those that we still carry like scars of battles or wars in our bodies, in our souls. We are all protective about the loves that we lost. My dearest friend A had always hated K. But I defend him, make excuses for him, remind A of something special that he did. Something that only I remember. Part factual, part facetious. I want A to forgive him as I have. Why is it important? I don’t know. It’s strange, but only the good memories stay. There’s a smile, albeit sad, but a smile nonetheless, as funny, warm, sweet moments are pulled out. S speaks with only affection and tenderness about H, whom S finally let go of a couple of years ago. And sought love again. Just like E, just like me. And found it. Just like E, just like me.
Where has all the pain gone? I remember tearing up every tangible memory of what is now one part of me. N reminds me of how I’d amputed a love – not clinical or surgical – therefore the pain indescribable. Every one of us remembers sitting after a loss and trying to kill ourselves, praying for an end to it all. L and I recall singing angry Alanis Morissette songs. “Does she speak eloquently? Would she have your baby? … And are you thinking of me when you fuck her?” L adds with a naughty nostalgic smile, “And everytime I scratch my nails down someone else’s back, oh, can you feel it?” Where has all the anger evaporated? S tells them of the day that I – the non-smoker – had puffed away an entire pack of cigarettes within half an hour wondering why my love hadn’t called me for a week. The lover who’s promised to hold us until he died. But he’s still alive. As are we. Human beings and their ability to survive never ceases to amaze. And now sadden. Nothing kills us. Not even the death of love.
I’m surprised that we can speak so simply, so easily, so beautifully of those that we believed hurt us so deeply that we never thought we’d walk again, perhaps even breathe again. And yet, here we are walking, singing, breathing, hoping. All forgiven but nothing forgotten. And suddenly it strikes me that we can’t hate them because we carry them within us. They’re now part of what we are. They’ve formed us – for better or for worse.
Our bodies are the maps of our life’s experiences, the writings on them the sum total of what we’ve learnt. Branded by the ones that once owned us, just as they are branded by us. Anyone who sees us for the first time sees in us a complex whole, our simplicity contaminated not by experiences as most think, but purified, distilled by the pieces of others that have mutated us, mutilated us, made us. I look at S and wish that instead of disowning those pieces, S would embrace them and arrange them neatly because when the pieces fit, they will form a whole, a different one, but a whole nonetheless. I think I’m going to tell this to S. I pray that A stops trying to turn R into C and accepts the new pieces because they are going to keep coming. I wish G would stop running, D would stop seeking and we all would accept our present as easily as we seem to do our past.
Perhaps some day our loves and us – we’ll all stand in a giant collective confessional. Wait for the other to play God, dig up the past, raise the dead and beg each other for forgiveness. We have to, we don’t have a chance. Because each moment that we breathe, live, we play porter to each other’s pieces. And our bodies, hearts and souls form the other’s literature.
After the storm came the calm. A finally talked. And I learnt my first lesson of love. Over Bacardis with lime for me and Vodka martinis for A. Shaken stirred and shattered. Love kills you. Then resuscitates you into something else. A blend of you and your lover. A plus C. The CPR of life. You’re never whole again. Because two pieces are ripped off, and two new ones attached. Two pieces of the one person you want to escape, the two cells you want to shed more than anything in the world. But they are now embedded within you. Tainting you forever. And you are now a venomous cocktail of love. A was never the same again. Never laughed the same, never cried the same. Never talked the same, never thought the same. I cried for the loss. And told myself – naively, oh so naively – I’d never allow this to happen to me.
I’d known G from the time we were both kids, we grew up together. Cool-headed, rational, sensible G. None of the volatile, impulsive, edgy fire that characterized A. G was A’s antithesis. Or so it seemed. Until M walked out on G. And I watched another erosion. Another subtraction and another addition. It could’ve been the same movie. A and G, they both bled. Until the floor turned black and their hearts went white. And I learnt something again. I saw how power corrupts. The power that you give someone. Or that someone gives you. The temptation is irresistible, you want to use it. M did just that. Played with the power that G gave away so easily, so simply. Wasn’t M’s fault. It was there to be used. Don’t we do that sometime or the other? Make someone cry because we know we can make them and they will. Say those words that we know will hurt. Press all the right or wrong buttons and sit back to watch the play with idle, interested curiosity. The perverse pleasure of power. G changed too. And again I decided – naively, oh so naively – never me, never ever me.
S was the frailest, the most vulnerable person I’ve known. Not a single section of S was unrecorded, no part was blank. Too many had written on, too many had taken away and too many had left their pieces. I don’t think S recalls ever being whole. So afraid was S of walking away from H and probably losing the last two pieces that were S’s own that pain after pain, infidelity after infidelity, hurt after hurt went unresolved, just absorbed. Until S walked in one day and I saw one giant throbbing sore, a grieving mass of unbelonging pieces, haphazardly held on. A glue of tears and fears. S laughed – gently, sadly – at my declarations, ‘You will never be me’. Wise knowing S.
Many years have passed now. And I’ve been slashed in red ink. Not too many writers, but the writings cover every square inch. I’m no longer bare, unadorned. I’ve been removed from, added to. Until I cannot tell from the cauldron within where I end and my past or present begins. Experience has taught me, like everyone else, a lot about love. But my understanding of it remains as distorted as a dyslexic’s performance at a Spelling Bee. And I learnt another lesson. You’re not written on only after the death of a love/ lover. The scribbling, the nibbling away happens from the beginning, through the entire period of love. Which is probably why people who’ve been in love and lived together for years and years seem like mirror images of each other. One’s pieces have been grafted onto another. A ridiculous face/off of cells, sloughing into each other.
Older, wiser, today I watch E plunge hopefully into a new relationship, after things ended with Z. Watch the phases of powerfulness and powerlessness carry E through and I wonder why we seek love so desperately, with such frantic recklessness. I had done just what E did. Sought love to heal the pain of love. Perhaps the most idiotic solution – cutting your hand and drawing blood to heal the bleeding in your leg. But we all seem to do that, we keep going back for more. We even have a sardonic word for it – rebound. So, are we all masochists? Or just hopeless optimists?
A drunk evening with my closest buddies and our alcohol-loosened tongues fearlessly talk. Of lovers. And love. Theories abound. Past amours are dissected, analysed, compared, rated. We all agree that it feels good. Talking about those that were, those that we still carry like scars of battles or wars in our bodies, in our souls. We are all protective about the loves that we lost. My dearest friend A had always hated K. But I defend him, make excuses for him, remind A of something special that he did. Something that only I remember. Part factual, part facetious. I want A to forgive him as I have. Why is it important? I don’t know. It’s strange, but only the good memories stay. There’s a smile, albeit sad, but a smile nonetheless, as funny, warm, sweet moments are pulled out. S speaks with only affection and tenderness about H, whom S finally let go of a couple of years ago. And sought love again. Just like E, just like me. And found it. Just like E, just like me.
Where has all the pain gone? I remember tearing up every tangible memory of what is now one part of me. N reminds me of how I’d amputed a love – not clinical or surgical – therefore the pain indescribable. Every one of us remembers sitting after a loss and trying to kill ourselves, praying for an end to it all. L and I recall singing angry Alanis Morissette songs. “Does she speak eloquently? Would she have your baby? … And are you thinking of me when you fuck her?” L adds with a naughty nostalgic smile, “And everytime I scratch my nails down someone else’s back, oh, can you feel it?” Where has all the anger evaporated? S tells them of the day that I – the non-smoker – had puffed away an entire pack of cigarettes within half an hour wondering why my love hadn’t called me for a week. The lover who’s promised to hold us until he died. But he’s still alive. As are we. Human beings and their ability to survive never ceases to amaze. And now sadden. Nothing kills us. Not even the death of love.
I’m surprised that we can speak so simply, so easily, so beautifully of those that we believed hurt us so deeply that we never thought we’d walk again, perhaps even breathe again. And yet, here we are walking, singing, breathing, hoping. All forgiven but nothing forgotten. And suddenly it strikes me that we can’t hate them because we carry them within us. They’re now part of what we are. They’ve formed us – for better or for worse.
Our bodies are the maps of our life’s experiences, the writings on them the sum total of what we’ve learnt. Branded by the ones that once owned us, just as they are branded by us. Anyone who sees us for the first time sees in us a complex whole, our simplicity contaminated not by experiences as most think, but purified, distilled by the pieces of others that have mutated us, mutilated us, made us. I look at S and wish that instead of disowning those pieces, S would embrace them and arrange them neatly because when the pieces fit, they will form a whole, a different one, but a whole nonetheless. I think I’m going to tell this to S. I pray that A stops trying to turn R into C and accepts the new pieces because they are going to keep coming. I wish G would stop running, D would stop seeking and we all would accept our present as easily as we seem to do our past.
Perhaps some day our loves and us – we’ll all stand in a giant collective confessional. Wait for the other to play God, dig up the past, raise the dead and beg each other for forgiveness. We have to, we don’t have a chance. Because each moment that we breathe, live, we play porter to each other’s pieces. And our bodies, hearts and souls form the other’s literature.
1 comment:
Pain crosses a limit where it becomes irrelevent to know who caused the hurt.Names dont matter then and accusations do not always heal.Such is the pain of being judged "inadequate" and "insufficient" by those you love.It's a betrayal for which no one knows the guilty. Although,with the baggage of pain, guilt becomes an accessory.The only question to be answered is, "why cant love alone be sufficient?"
Bhavani, I think unrequited love is a man's biggest strength. Nurture your hurts, if possible look for more and your writing will become more powerful.
Regarding confiding, yes it helps but you also suffer a loss, the loss of intensity with which you felt it. At one time you get sick of the intensity and vomit it out in a confession box but later the aspiring writer in you complains for wasting the ink.
I have fallen in love with your writing Bhavani..
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