écris
breakfast
6:34 PMI close my eyes and allow the steam rising in wafts from the mug to gently carress my face. It feels as soft as a pair of loving hands but once it dissipates, I am left with a cold sheen of condensation that coats my chin, cheeks and nose. Making coffee is a ritual, drinking it, however, is a duty. A duty I undertake daily so that my eyes remain bright and alert, my mind alive and my limbs nimble. It is a shame, indeed, that I now resort to such measures to falsify my ailing body into believing that, somewhere in the recesses of weaking cartiledge and brittle bones, it still retains its youth.
I hear the creaking of bedsprings above me indicating that you have woken. Reaching for the chipped green mug that I've hoarded for purely practical reasons, I pour in coffee to the brim. You like your coffee black - a fact you shared with me years ago, I had nodded and listened with rapt attention, but only because I was adjusting to the novelty of young love. Now, your words and opinions sail over or right through me, I have become as semi-opaque as the black liquid you consume every morning.
You appear in the doorway of the kitchen we have shared for the past sixteen years, your shoulders nearly filling the breadth of the royal blue doorframe. Sometimes I still get taken aback by your size, feeling a little jolt of surprise whenever I turn to grab the coriander or to rush for the telephone and you are there, in your dark blue blazer, filling up the spaces in whichever room we might be in. I can't recall exactly when the questions began to associate themselves to my suprise. Questions like "Who are you?", and "What are you doing here?" and recently- "Will you be staying till he gets home?".
This train of thought sets off warning whistles in my head, but already it has gained momentum and I am hurtling at breakneck speed past the stations along the railway track, screeching to a halt at the one which shows me the scene of a girl in a white lace dress, and a boy in a hat. You were there too, I'm sure. At least, I think you were. Everything but the side profile of his face, which I had sneakily watched through a curtain of hair, his smile, surfacing like a bubble in water and disappearing almost as instantly as it appeared, and his eyes, that flickered to meet mine and held my gaze a tad longer than necessary, is a hazy blur.
His eyes were deep-set, framed by a ring of thick, dark lashes, capped off by unruly brows. "Mad eyebrow game" I had giggled to my then-best friend later on, while we stuffed ourselves with chips slathered in salsa, filling our mouths with the food and talk of adolescence. I can't quite remember what had happened after our intial meeting, though occasionally, a stray memory floats past my conscious mind like a dust speck, carried by wind currents that move so elusively that to try and capture it, or freeze it, would be a most ridiculous thing to do.
You break into my memories with an unsightly yawn as you sink into the nearest chair at the dining table. I absent-mindedly set about preparing breakfast, retrieving eggs from the fridge and turning on the stove. I hold my breath as the acrid smell of gas fills the tiny space around me- I am prone to gagging at even the slightest scent these days, my olfactory nerves going haywire whenever I step into crowded places like malls or the morning market.
After placing your meal before you, I lean against the counter and wrap the ends of my terry-white dressing robe around myself. I watch two lives at once- this one before me, with you scarfing down food I told myself I would never learn to make, my right ear trained for the first waking cry of our child, who has now learnt to sleep in past six a.m., and the other life - the one where I am clambering up a mountain, clad in the pair of hiking boots I have long since traded in for my current sewing kit. In that life, he is in front of me, but whenever I will him to be, he is behind me, one hand on my back as I stop to catch my breath. Occasionally, when there is a lull in the afternoon, when Baby lies asleep in my arms, I allow my thoughts to drift a little further,a little higher up the mountain to where there is a clearing. I stand with him, not touching, not speaking, but I hear his breath come in short puffs, and I see mine rise in little temporary clouds to join the greater ones above us. Without turning my head, I know he is watching me and every time I reach that part of the daydream, my heart breaks a little inside. It breaks for all the times I could have looked back, but never did. It breaks for the day I finally watched him in return, but by then he was already surrounded by a bed of white carnations, and the smile he wore had faded into a fixed grimace. It breaks for the day I stood before you, and all I could think of was the fact that the wedding veil had cast everything and everyone, including you, into a hazy blur, just like in the memory of the day I first met him.
A shriek pierces the air, all at once terrifying and familiar. The baby is awake. I gather the loose ends of my robe and my wits around me, and by putting one foot before the other, I manage to make my way out of the kitchen and to the stairs, before beginning the slow climb upwards.
1 commentaire
how could i not love you. please never lose your magic <3
ReplyDeleteoh, go on.