Like a Bird, page 13
Kat had written out a poem on a piece of ripped yellow legal pad paper:
To keep up a
passionate courtship
with a tree
one must be mad.
I found it on the way back to hers and laughed. That night I decided I would sleep at Kat’s. I wasn’t ready to face what an offer like staying at Ky’s would mean, and I was trying to give my intuition time to work. I texted him about giving myself some time to think it through, and he replied that he understood.
After work a few days later, I sat underneath Cillian, daring myself not to touch any of my baked goods, and I let my mind wander. I had decided that I would start dipping my toe and feel out living with Ky. Kat and I had discussed it, and I explained to her that it felt important for me to see how it would feel to explore something unknown. At first, she voiced judgment, but, over time, I was able to convince her that something was calling me there. To Ky. I think because she was romantic, she got it.
Dadi-ma used to practice meditation under the teachings of a guru Saraswati. So I had always been interested in the mysticism of meditation and its effects on the human body. Especially after witnessing the effects it had on her. In just five weeks she was able to convince me so thoroughly of her living standards, providing inspiration, that almost a decade later I still remembered her in day-to-day life, like Scripture. Nobody occupied my life like that. She was so agile, so sprightly; her senses were so keen—right up until she died. I admired her ability, her strength. Through her, I was able to understand God existed. I went back to these memories as I began to track my instincts; it was as if I were relearning old magic. So there I sat, under Cillian, meditating, trying to remember how to conjure the data she had passed down on to me.
I longed for family, I always had. But I don’t know if I ever really believed that I’d get it from my parents. So, at a certain point, I let go of trying. Also their trusting of Simon over me, their own daughter, felt like the worst blow yet. So I let go even more. In the last moments, as I had accepted my rape, I also accepted my fate-to-come without real resistance. Otherwise I wouldn’t have survived. What my parents decided felt like an actual betrayal. And maybe that’s what made me stand up for myself, made me leave and follow Dadi-ma, and Alyssa, in the stars. I needed them to really hurt me, and they delivered.
All in all, I know I had it lucky. Others had given their lives to this. I thought of Jyoti Singh Pandey. Jyoti, Jyoti, Jyoti, I heard myself ringing. I couldn’t sleep the first time I had heard what happened, like I felt it in my body. Like it had happened to me, and the many versions of me before. It’s hard to explain what I felt. It’s as if the agony of all women had seeped into me and that I screamed their pain in vengeance. Gutted out with a steel pipe, Jyoti, Jyoti, Jyoti, my sister. I still remember overhearing, like it was yesterday, the conversation between Baba and Rakesh, two Indian men with such little compassion. Women were not believed, were hunted and killed, and I had survived. I would do something of this life, I would make it mine. I had to learn how to do that, at the very least.
And with that, all of a sudden, under Cillian, I started crying, unstoppable. It was the first time since the rape that I had felt it again. The burden of what had happened to my body. I wanted to forgive myself, but I couldn’t yet. I felt I had betrayed myself as well. Maybe that was the hardest truth to face. I felt I had let what happened to me happen to me. Even though I could theorize that it was more complex, right now I still only had myself to blame.
My body was burning. Thinking of Jyoti, then myself, I felt a dull ache of resistance as my bones started vibrating. I felt as if I owed Jyoti something for surviving. I resented myself for living and breathed in, shrouding myself in my misery. It was okay, I told myself. I had to carry on, I had no other choice.
I didn’t understand why I felt that now that I was trying to pay attention, to listen for instructions. But I knew I was being directed to Ky’s. So, with Kat’s blessing, I moved into his place with all my belongings that still fit into my old JanSport bag—a few books, a sweater, two dresses, one pair of jeans, and underwear—and placed them on the striped linen bed. I was excited to make something of this space, to carve out a home. With the boys, I secretly felt I was always in Kat’s way. She never made me feel it, but I knew I was. I felt irresponsible that I had let her help me, but I had taken it, selfishly. At Ky’s I felt like there was an equal exchange, or at least I could make sure there would be.
I placed my belongings in their relative places, and after a half hour of lying on the bed, I decided to make myself something to eat and claim the home further. Being in another space was exciting: there was such a nice layout to this home, different from Kat’s, whose was more chic, almost French; Ky’s was like a millennial’s take on midcentury modern. I guess Ky’s mom had converted the inside of the triplex after buying the entire building. The interiors were clean and linear, the ideal vision of adulthood in your twenties. I felt, again, a bit spiteful. Some people’s privileges astounded me, and this was coming from me. As I walked down to the kitchen, I brainstormed ideas for the room. I’d get a hanging plant from the farmers’ market, maybe go down to Brooklyn Flea to find some nice keepsakes. Building a room was a metaphor for all the ways you had to rebuild yourself, and it was daunting. I felt out of breath. Still excited, but my nerves were getting the best of me. And then when I got into the kitchen I realized I wasn’t alone.
“Hello,” a voice whispered out of the corner. I looked over cautiously: it was Emilio.
“Oh, hi,” I said with relief.
He smiled, his fingers sticky from Triscuits smeared with purple grape jelly. His mouth was full. “You’re seeing me at my worst.”
“Oh, no judgment, seriously.”
“You hungry?”
I nodded a half nod.
“Let me cook us something real,” he said, gesturing.
I nodded my head because I wanted to be a woman who could accept care from a man. I sat down on a nearby stool, lightly combing my hair with my fingers. He stood, mildly ashamed, licking his fingers one by one, hastily finishing off his ritual by sucking on the webbed side of his palm. Swiftly, he reached down to his pants, rubbing his fingers against the denim three times before he started. There was something on the stove, and as I inhaled, the sweet smell of coconut milk wafted through me and memories of India floated through the room. The busy streets and the air filled with humidity and spices; the acid reek of petrol and random rot that smelled like garbage, mixed in with the aromatic bliss of cooking cardamom. It filled me with an intense nostalgia. In that instant Dadi-ma’s face drifted in and around my soul, and in mere moments she was there with me, sitting clear eyed, the lines on her face tracing upward to her smile. The hem of her saree brushed against my right forearm, and as we watched each other, her eyes gelatinous, everything felt resplendent for a moment. With her presence, again, I was beginning to trust myself to the situation I had found myself in. Her pale wrinkled left hand, spotted with a solar system of smudgy dots, lingered near my right, and the calmness emanated, at last—at last.
The three of us sat in our silence for a while.
“I’m making a coconut chai rice pudding.”
“Okay, wow.”
“I may be a mess, but I can cook.”
“That’s usually an impressive quality.”
He laughed. “Usually.”
There was a pause.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah…” He seemed unsure. “I’ve just been filling my days with my work. I’m a graphic designer, so I can basically be lazy and have flashes of inspiration, then be lazy again. It’s a nice cycle of productivity.”
I laughed, I related. It had always been hard to inspire me, but there’d be moments when I would feel it, and it would pay off. I knew I had talents; I just needed to learn how to harness them.
“Ky went out with Jade, they’ll be back later.”
Ugh. I looked at Dadi-ma. She looked regrettably unfazed.
“It’s her birthday,” he added.
“When did they go?”
“A while ago.”
I sat silently, wondering why Dadi-ma was here, placid.
“So tell me about yourself, Taylia! This is exciting, new friends.”
I came back to myself, biting the left corner of my lip. “Oh.”
“Let’s start with when is your birthday? LOL. What’s your sign?”
Birthday? I forgot I even had one.
“June twenty-seventh… I’m a Cancer.” I coughed, drawing the awkwardness out. “Are Jade and Ky serious… you think?” I cringed at my abruptness.
“Oh… I think you’ll have to ask him that,” Emi answered blankly.
I wondered why he said it like that.
Jealousy came over me. I let myself steep in the pettiness that was coming up. I bet Jade was one of those girls who would say Ky’s full name to establish intimacy, to establish a past, to establish a history that nobody else knew of. I imagined her begging, Eat my pussy, Kynan, baby, please.
“Girlfriends are… tricky?”
I came back to myself again, feeling uncontained. “Oh?”
“After this last breakup, I’m just not sure if I could do it again.”
“Date, you mean?”
“Yeah. I mean, I loved her and she just fucking…” His voice began to break.
I was stunned, so I observed him in his softness, in this moment of delicacy. From the corners of my eyes I saw Dadi-ma’s force field fading around me. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
He reached his wet palm to mine, swollen with sadness. He reached for comfort, but it was too fast a movement and my body reacted in a convulsed outrage, jolting back into my seat. His look was generous despite my outbreak.
“I’m sorry, Taylia, I didn’t mean to startle you…”
The absence of saliva was making my throat dry. I sighed through the words: “I just don’t like people touching me… all of a sudden. You know?” I wasn’t really asking, but it came out that way.
“Of course.” A stream of sweat passed through the side of his face. “I mean, that makes sense.”
It was how he said it: it was suggestive.
“What do you mean?” An unbearable acidity began to rise in my cotton-dry mouth, suddenly raspy.
“Because…” He looked at me fully this time, “…of what happened.”
We made eye contact, and in the connection I felt extreme rage. I felt like the wind had been knocked out of me. There was no refuge here. Feeling the blood move through my face, I wanted to scream. I wanted to run.
He was judging me, I knew it. I could feel it. I knew in the back of his mind he was looking at me with disgust, wondering what Simon had seen in me. I could see him talking but nothing was registering. I slowly pulled myself out of it and looked at him again, tremulous and sick. My mind rolled with one thought: That son of a bitch, Ky. My senses were dilated and I wanted to run from this internal heaviness. It’s your own fault nobody likes you, Taylia. You dumb bitch, you thought you could trust these men? Huh. Nobody loves you, especially not Ky.
Dadi-ma flickered with an eerie velocity, becoming transparent, until she disappeared.
“I gotta go, I can’t be here.”
Endowed with a composure I forgot I had, I walked out.
17.
A car pulled up, “Raspberry Beret” blaring, and Alyssa sashayed over from across the street. She swayed, moving to the beat like a clock ticking to time. Her face was a myriad of baroque expressions that transported us to a stage.
“Tay…”
I looked up at her, my face full of questions. “Yes?”
“Do you think we were raised with class awareness as a construct, but we were just never told we benefited from class privilege?… I’ve been thinking about it a lot. About this farce we’ve been born into.”
I stayed silent.
“You know what Mama is like with money, and, well, Baba…” She trailed off. “It’s about so much more.” She paused. “Don’t you think? So much more than what we’ve been allowed to see.”
She was looking over at me. Her eyes were bloodshot and her face was strained. She looked tired and lethargic, her eyes a bit sunken in. I very rarely saw my sister looking so weak and lifeless. I was afraid. Something had recently changed in her.
“I’ve been feeling so, so disillusioned.”
My breathing was slowing down.
“I’m beginning to realize how much I don’t know.”
I was starting to feel faint.
“How much I didn’t get to learn.”
We were both silent after that. We both wallowed in our own pain, our hearts searing with disappointment. I knew what I was too afraid to say out loud: Alyssa had become tired of life, and now it was too late.
I was beginning to see myself as someone who had no one, cared for only by women who were dead, besides Kat. I decided to go back to Ky’s, but to maintain a quietly hostile demeanor when I returned. I knew I was being a brat, a little passive aggressive, but I also didn’t care. I wanted to be a person who owned her feelings. I had to stay alert; I no longer felt comforted by his kindness or his and Emi’s feigned concerns. For a second right after Emi told me, I thought I’d go back to Kat, but welcomed the free months of rent Ky offered, as a means of repair, and I felt some kind of justice taking it. I knew that my silence was confusing for him, but I also didn’t really care. I wanted to stand by what was coming up for me. I was tired of accepting disrespect.
A week later, I caught the A train down to the beach at Jacob Riis. I felt empty as I sat on the subway, people-watching and daydreaming. When I finally arrived at the beach there was a cold sting in the wind, a black surf in the distance. The fear of drowning enchanted me. There was so much destruction attached to the waves. The water was smooth and cunning; its seduction could pull you, hold you down, and kill you. In two hours Ky would come home and maybe knock on the door, perhaps say sorry yet again. I sat and watched the water.
You’ll like it.
The blood drained from my face like sand in an hourglass.
You’ll like it.
The images were vivid. Recollections of that night flashed in front of me. I felt the hands searching me again, their insipid cocks living vicariously through their fingers. I closed my eyes and thought of something good. I needed to transport myself to happiness. But there was nothing. The feeling was too strong. These bad memories were indelible. I lay down, submerging myself into the sinking sand, splaying out across its majestic vastness. As I parted my arms like an angel, I hit something along the way. A piece of glass scratched my hand lightly. I picked it up and eyed the crystal-like object closely as it reflected the sunlight. I turned the glass at an angle and then sliced it down onto my arm without skipping a beat. The divine pain was my gateway drug; blood poured out next to me as I saw stars.
This was it: the sweet spot. I had entered the red room, I had entered actual melancholia. To wallow in it sedated me in those nanoseconds. I looked up again toward the stars, through the sun, the clear skies, trying to concentrate on a bird. I longed to be free; I longed to forgive myself and let it all go. I moved to my side so now I faced the water. Out in front of me was a small boat, the cruel waves slowly crashing against its hull. I focused on the sea. The persistent tide gradually mesmerized me, the subsisting force awoke a hunger inside of me. I fell into the hypnotism of the never-ending waters that stirred the small boat. It floated in the middle of nowhere, abandoned by mankind, neglected of its purpose. There, in the middle of the water, that’s where I was in my life.
I recalled Valéry, “The Sea, the sea, perpetually renewed.”
I took off my clothes and the necklace with the rings that Dadi-ma had given me and placed them on the sand. I walked to the edge of the water, completely bare, offering myself to this power. Hoping to be renewed. I cleaned myself, rubbed away the grime from my skin. Blinking in fury, I resigned myself to this moment. I didn’t care who was around me, I was one with the moment. The water had a judgmental sharpness to it, as if it sensed my weakness. It remembered me, it consoled me. You are strong, it told me. No, I’m not, I screamed back. The cut along my arm burned senselessly, the salt in the water piercing deeper, but I meditated on that pain. Please don’t get infected. I screamed, wanting to self-destruct.
The moon was low as I cleaned the blood off the shard of glass and brought it to my hair and chopped, chopped, crunched it off. My hair was thick, but I got to the end of it. I needed it gone, it lingered from that night. The memory of their hands still groped me in the silence, it still mauled me on this empty beach. The cut was uneven. There was hair peeking out at all different hesitant lengths. But mostly, it hung below my ears in a do akin to a bob, but not quite. For now it would suffice. What was done was done. Khallas, as Kat would sometimes say. I was entering a new beginning. I realized that my parents would never know my story. I hated them for not caring enough to find out what really happened. Here, on this beach, I felt bitter and hard, and even as my eyes scanned the horizon, the savage twilight failed to soothe me.
Hatred was much better. It gave me resolve to move forward.
“Last Goodbye,” by Jeff Buckley, played in my ear—Taylia, you have to go home, you have to go back to Ky—
I awoke abruptly. The sharp wind was on my face. Immediately, I stared out onto the water, monumental, opaque, like a sweeping ghost, and the depth and breadth of it stared back at me. The blackness of the crepuscular ocean, like thick tar, no longer enchanted me. A hypnotic fear rose up inside as I heard myself say I didn’t want to die. As I ran from the beach I only faintly remembered why I awoke so quickly. I’d had a dream, and Alyssa was in it. She had spoken to me, she was there, along the constellations. I ran from the night, this time in search of warmth, wanting a home so badly.
