House Sitting Blues

Your house has taken to me. Everything is in its place. The trash has been trashed, the clothes I washed have been folded, another set sits in a neat pile atop the machine, waiting to be washed and sun dried. All the ashtrays have been emptied, the de-humidifiers are collecting moisture as we speak, and the floors are so clean I can finally walk barefoot across the surface. I rolled the windows of the front seat of your Gypsy just about an inch so it can breathe, and I’m pleased to report there isn’t an ounce of moisture, in fact, it smells exactly as it does in dry weather, the faint scent of rubber and foam. No walls are leaking, the balcony drain is unclogged and in a state of readiness, should it rain. All the dishes are clean and gleaming. There’s fresh milk in the fridge, and fresh bread, and eggs, and butter, and the ice-trays in the freezer have been refilled with water.

All that’s missing right now is you, and single malt slipped over blocks of ice. And a simple meal spread across the table, and your feet tapping to this luscious music, and my fingers stroking your wrist as you delicately rummage through my palm, feeling the lines it contains, the songs inscribed within their texture and the promise of happiness that they assure.

I’ll think of you at night, when I say my prayers and fade into sleep, and in the morning, when I wake up blissful, despite your absence, and bask in the expanse of your bed. And I’ll wish the same wish I’ve been wishing since I started to house-sit. I’ll wish I lived here too.

Maybe I already do.

The Panic Room

It is this sliver of last evening that comes immediately to mind–being cornered by jute bags. I’d pressed the red button with my feet. The jute bags started to inflate around me until it builds into a looming tower and the only open space is the size of hole only a bit larger than the one Alice would have fallen through. I can see a small stretch of the ceiling. I’m unimpressed. The installation hasn’t lived up to its title. It isn’t The Panic Room I imagined it would be. In fact, I feel cocooned and calm and isolated from the glitterati at the opening. I sit down with my glass of wine. There’s a green button I know I’m supposed to press to deflate the jute walls, but I’m not ready yet. I wait a few minutes. The jute bags suddenly deflate themselves and expose me. How ironic that the panic room panicked and overheated itself because I didn’t panic soon enough. I walk away from the crime scene. I know there’s a camera that’s filmed me but I don’t care. I didn’t break it, I’m not buying it.

 

 

Last night I slept like a hibernating bear. And for the first time in weeks, on my own bed. I’d forgotten how glorious the mornings usually are in my room. Wind wafting in through the two balconies, grazing over my body, lulling me into a more advanced state of sleephood. I thought I’d call it a lazy sleepy Sunday, thought I’d bask in the afterglow of my dreams. But a call on my phone interrupted the haze. It was your neighbour. She sounds distressed. She tells me your balcony is leaking. I wake up instantly. I tell her I’ll be over as soon as I can.

 

 

My breath starts to collapse. My heart announces its fear and beats ferociously. The muscles around my chest start to quiver as I envision disaster. I retrace my steps. Yes, I’d closed all the taps. I’d shut off the washing machine, so this couldn’t possibly be my fault. Why did this have to happen on my watch? It took you three years to trust me with your keys, and now this! I can sense impending doom. I should have slept in your bed last night. I shouldn’t have abandoned the house.

 

 

I eat my breakfast mechanically. I wouldn’t have bothered but my flatmate had taken the trouble to whip eggs and lace them with slices of Gouda. She’d even toasted bagels and buttered them for me. I hold the bread to my mouth, my teeth sink into it impulsively. I search for the bits Gouda, but all I can taste is disaster. I try to make conversation, but every sentence is a dead-end and brings me back to the subject of collapse.

Images flash in my head at the speed of half-thoughts. That night when I walked into your bedroom and stepped into a flood, and the astonished look on your face when you discovered the waterfall that had taken over your wall. Minutes later, as if on cue, the ceiling in the store room began to leak. And then a week later, we witnessed the fury of termites as they chomped through the false ceiling of the room on the roof.

 

 

Since you’ve returned its been disaster after disaster. And we’ve tackled them elegantly. Built a partnership out of it. But this time you’re not around to help pick up the pieces, to contain the flood. And the fact of your submission, the gesture contained in the keys you handed me, the significance of it frightens me although I wouldn’t have had it any other way. I’d rather you let me house-sit than leave it unsupervised.

 

 

I rushed over and scanned the balcony from downstairs. I ran upstairs, negotiated the three locks that kept me from disaster. I walked to the balcony and couldn’t find any water except for the memory of it contained in the large stain in the corner beside the clogged drain. You returned my call and instructed me to unclog the drain. I did. I explained the situation. I tell you it must have rained here last night and since there was nowhere for the water to go, it seeped through the layers in the ground until it found four or five little outlets and then it began the process of catharsis.

 

 

I’m trying to contain my hysteria. I know now its completely unwarranted. Everything is fine. I wish I was as calm and relaxed as I was when the jute bags inflated around me in that artificially controlled panic room. I should have had more respect for your time zone. Shouldn’t have called you at that unearthly hour of morning and invaded your sleep. But nothing could have salved me. Your voice was the tonic I needed. “Thank You,” you said over the phone, and I believe you meant it. By then I had begun to leak salt water. Trails of pearls dripped across my cheeks. I tried to say something in between my long, deep breaths, but my malformed thoughts didn’t translate into sound. All I managed was a monosyllabic goodbye after which you disconnected.

 

 

There are many things I’d never tasted until I met you. Single Malts, for instance. Or Sour-dough Bread. Marmite. Rage. Sprouts. Jealousy. Gouda. Burnt Garlic. Grilled Tomatoes. Stir-friend French beans. Fear. Paradise. Black Pepper. Love. Today I added Panic to that list. This morning I finally understood its texture, and the post-quake tremors, and the painful feeling of clotted blood and shocked muscles and contracted lungs. And finally, the cathartic aftertaste of salt water that salved my dry, dry tongue.

Birthday Blues

A muggy evening. Intermittent drizzles. Our second encounter. Cafe Mondegar. Your feet grazing against mine under the table. The jukebox slipping into song each time someone fed it a coin. Stuffed mushrooms. A pitcher of beer. You spread regions of your life across the mug-ringed table, your fingers a compass guiding me through twists and turns.

“I never expected it,” you said in reference to last night’s passionate combustion.

“I find that hard to believe,” I said as I sipped from my mug.

“The last time was a long time ago. In New York. She must have been a few years younger than you,” you said.

“How old was she?” I asked, unable to contain my curiousity.

“About 28, I think.”

“Three weeks ago I turned 23,” I said.

You were mystified. You were so sure I was older.

For a while I debated whether to ask about your age. I tried to decipher from the clues I’d been given. I tried to decide from the grey of your beard and the lines across your brow. But I couldn’t hazard a guess. Perhaps I was afraid.

Fifty-three, I learned. Exactly thirty years older.

“She was too overwhelmed by my age. She let me go,” you said.

I didn’t think much of it then. You were supposed to be a two-night stand, a ten-line poem in my grand anthology of lovers, a bookmark.

Tomorrow I turn 26. For three years you’ve watched me evolve. Sometimes you watched from the sidelines, but more often you interfered with the change. You caused my heart to beat faster than it should, you taught my body to understand age before it could begin its own process of aging. You fed on my youth and gave me spoonfuls of your middle-age in exchange. My muscles feel young and taut, my breasts are still wildly upright like intellectual snobs, my feet are still strong and my hands can do more housework than twenty housewives put together. But somewhere my spirit has aged, and the region around my aorta has had to make space for my heart that is growing too quickly and robustly in size and shape.

There was every chance that I would never be born. My mother was in her forties when she conceived me. She’d recovered from two miscarriages, her two sons had been born at least ten years ago. The doctors convinced her I was high-risk, that one of us could die, either her or me. She was insistent. She wanted a girl. A few months into her pregnancy her doctor predicted the exact date of my birth, the day of the feast of Mt. Carmel. She suggested I be named Carmel, in honour of that miracle. My mother chose Rosalyn instead, after my father’s mother, Rosy. I don’t have her fair skin and greenish-blue eyes and her elegance. What I did inherit from her, though, was her generosity even in times of duress. And what I remember most of her was how she’d sit me on her lap and offer me orange-coloured candy wrapped in orange paper. I called her Dadar-mai instead of Dada-mai, because she lived in Dadar, in the house where my father was born, near the Portuguese Church.

Twenty-six years later I wonder if my mother is disappointed in me. If she’s unhappy about my refusal to adhere to norms of decency, my refusal to find a man and settle down and prepare for grandmotherhood. I tell myself every night that if I wasn’t a writer, if I wasn’t a wanderluster, I would have been a faithful wife, a loyal mother, a “perfect” woman. But I cannot deny my affair with language and my proclivity for experience, my tendency to burn and burn and reduce myself to ashes before I rise again and begin anew the process of self-combustion. I ask myself if I should find another bookmark and let you go. But there are things I cannot consciously decide. My will is no match for my spirit.

I’m too in-love with life, I care too much for hysterical madness and the beauty of the daily. I love my house and the two beautiful women I live with who nourish my everyday. I love this little community of friends I inherited the day I moved to Khirki. I have old friends and new friends and too many strangers who are transitioning into friends. There is always wine, and butter, and bread, and eggs with which to make pancakes to feed anyone who drops by. There  is laughter and forgiveness and the promise of rain and the threat of winter and the memory of summer. So much goddamn life to live for I cannot-will not-shall not settle for anything as mundane as domesticity.

At 26 I’m still afraid of cockroaches. I’m not as scared of authority. I believe more fiercely than ever in rainbows, and I still worship at the irreverent altar of Henry Miller. I love with too much abandon and I strip more nakedly than before. I’ve changed in ways too marvellous to document, too significant to contain. Look, I’m changing as we speak. I have learned to live with vanishings and I’ve learned of emotions more torrential than loss.

There are fruits I have yet to taste, visions I have yet to dream, scents I have yet to experience, lips I have yet to kiss, loves i have yet to bury, lives I have yet to live.

I never thought we’d survive three years. I never conceived you would love me with your simultaneous hearts–lover, father, child, sinner and redeemer.

I never thought I’d watch as you mock your fifties while I embraced my twenties.

I wish you were here tonight. I wish you could watch me blow candles and cut cake and wish for glorious things.

Somebody asked me what I wanted this year for my birthday. I couldn’t quite reply. There are many things I want. A new laptop, a CD of Jaco Pastorius’ Birthday Concert, a funky moleskine, a wooden chair to complement my writing desk, a copy of Jeanette Winterson’s Weight, a DVD of Our Lady of the Flowers, a fantastic book deal, a garland made of hand-picked flowers, potted plants of different herbs, specially basil and mint leaves.

I am full of want and longing for things I’ll never have. But this year, as I turn 26, I’ll celebrate because for the first time in twenty-six years I have all I’ll ever need.

Happy Birthday, Jaco Pastorius