You told me you have loved me in all of your lives. And I believe you. I believe you more than I ever let on. That you only judge me to protect me. You watch the ground for glass; you know I love to walk barefoot. I never have to watch the sky for thunder. You always smell like rain on grass on concrete. I seep into you willingly; I always want to be a part of you. You fumble at my metaphors reluctantly, knowing I am not in my words, not in my lies. You know every step to my conclusions, the twisted roads to my decisions. You are a tree, large and inescapable. I play unattended among your roots. And when I feel the pressure of despair, you fold me among your leaves. I am never afraid when I am with you.   

When you left, I wasn’t quite sure who I was anymore. I had grown so accustomed to your smell, to the way you talk, the half-smiles and the creases in your skin. I could predict every laugh. Hardly anything ever made you laugh. It was the small things – an unfinished sentence, the irony of our incredible sensitivity, the routine scattering of my mind. I could talk to you about anything. And I always knew what you were going to say. The beauty of it was that I still wanted to hear you say it. With a lisp, without hesitation, with every confidence that I was likely to completely disagree with you, but love you anyway. I loved the rain, you loved the sun. I loved the ocean, you loved your pool. I loved you, I am sure that you loved me. I am sure you didn’t want to leave. I know that I didn’t want to let you go. I still haven’t. I still carry you around like a trophy. Like a crazy athlete who doesn’t want the world to forget what she won. Or who she was. I can still see you, the way you were before you started to fade at the edges. Tall, warm, strong, inescapably beautiful. Stubborn. I sometimes wonder if you would still be here if you hadn’t been so stubborn. I’m a Gemini, of course I confuse you. But I was a Gemini too, and I never tried to confuse you. It was one of the things we laughed about. Two twins. One half of the other. Does that mean I am incomplete now? Such redundancy – I haven’t felt whole for 4 years. I cant believe its been that long. A twinless twin, the ultimate irony. Not to mention the fact that we looked nothing alike. Not even when you began to shrink, to fold into yourself. Like a cigarette. But it was me catching fire. It was me in pieces on the ground. You smoked the entire time. Laughing that it wasn’t what was going to kill you. And you made me quit. It was me who had chain-smoked our entire childhood away. Me who reached for a smoke everytime I was worried or scared or bored. It was me who started buying packs for you Menthol, only menthol on the way to and from your house. I remember the first time you took a stick off me. I was waiting for you outside the hospital, melting into the blue and white concrete tile that would come to signify your leaving. Like a cold flag. Like a checkered warning. I was leaning against a huge alabaster pillar, digging my toes into the small patches of grass that had managed to dodge all the sickness. You slumped down next to me. It was the first time I had ever seen you cry. You didn’t say a word. You didn’t have to, but I would have like to hear it anyway. You reached for my pack, I had left it half-open and crushed on the ground. I tried to grab it first, I was so used to you throwing them away mid-conversation. You pulled a cigarette out, pried the blue lighter from my clenched fist and tried to light it. You didn’t even know how to use my lighter. You struggled for a minute, then threw both on the ground, slamming the back of your head against the pillar. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what to say to you. I didn’t want to tell you I was angry, that I hated you for showing me a glimpse of a world without you. I didn’t want to talk to you, to hold you, to tell you it would be ok. Because nothing was going to be ok. It never would. I pulled my half-smoked cigarette from my mouth and let it hand loosely in my wrist, by your leg. I would tell myself again and again that I didn’t offer it to you. That you just took it. That this wasn’t my fault. That none of it was.

You keep asking me about my relationships. I don’t know what to tell you – I have never really loved anyone. Well, I loved Meher and Anya. More than I will ever be able to tell you. Anya’s face was the last thing I saw when I lost consciousness. She was the face I wanted to leave with, the one gift I wanted to carry with me to wherever I was going too. Do you know that story? My Mother could barely talk by the time she told it to me; I think that’s why she felt like she had to. She told me that when we left, we couldn’t take anything with us and that’s why so little of this world mattered. But she believed that her God would let her carry one thing with her, one of anything she wanted. The one most precious thing she had been given here. As a gift to him. A memory, a prayer, a face. I remember asking her how I would carry my collector’s edition Neruda folio with me. She wasn’t amused. It was leather bound! With gold leafing! And have you heard any Neruda? Don’t come in. Go away. Go back south with your umbrella, go back north with your serpent’s teeth.  A poet lives here. No sadness may cross this threshold. That was probably the closest I came to prayer. She said she would take my hands with her, she said they were the most precious things she had been given here. I can still feel her lips on my palms, they felt so dry. So brittle. Anyways, that’s why I tried to carry Anya’s face with me – I don’t think I could have lived without her, especially not in death.                 But in the spirit of this little game you are playing – sure. Which one would you specifically like to break down. Aaron? He was my favourite. Completely pliable, completely inarticulate in his need for me. I don’t think he ever really wanted me, but I know that he needed me desperately. He liked to think he could fix me. He would hold me and say clever things like – I know there are two of you, a very good girl and a very bad one, I’m here to keep the bad one in check. I used to wish reality came in very tall shot glasses. If he thought that he could control anything about me, I really wonder if I was truly the crazy one. But he did love me. And he stood by me, when I didn’t really know what it meant to be stood by. He was always there, at the bottom of each mountain of pain I flung myself off of. I mean, I would look up – relatively bloodied and hoping for some sort of epiphany about life and the meaning of everything around me, and all I would find, without fail, was Aarons face, his hands. I was never fair to him. I was barely nice to him. I knew all the words though. I walked into that relationship completely scripted. Pre-wired. It’s like how babies can swim at birth. And then they learn to be afraid of drowning, afraid of death. I was like that with Aaron – I knew how to swim through him. I don’t think he ever realized just how little he really had of me. I think I always thought I was better than him, better than he would ever be. I know that’s not true. I was just a lot more fucked up. Love was simple for him. It was trust and faith and friendship. It was something tangible. Love was wrapping me up in his arms and promising never to let go. And meaning it. He had a beautiful smile. Did I love him? Wait, this is your day-job, right? No. I didn’t love him. I didn’t love him for four years. I think I missed the entire gamut of emotions that you are supposed to feel in a relationship – I was wonderfully numb. No love. Love was just never in that equation. Do you know what the funniest thing was. I think I used to push him to punish me. I wanted him to walk away from me, I wanted to feel something for him, even if it was pain. I craved to be angry with him, because that would have meant I cared. Or something. The worst came towards the end, when I cheated. When I told him that I cheated. When I waited for him to hit me, to walk away from me, to tell me I was the most pathetic creature (or “bad person”, he wasn’t the most eloquent child I knew) that he had ever met. Do you know what he did. He hugged me. He asked me if I was hurting. He told me he would take care of me. That I shouldn’t worry. I think I might have slapped him. Or wanted to. Aaron was incredible. I wonder what he must have done in his last life to have to deal with me in this one.                Do you believe in Karma? I didn’t. Not really, not in the way that I believed in poetry or my Mother – I kind of accepted the notion of what goes around comes around and consequently floated in a guilt-free zone, self-exempt from the rule. Until I met Jai. Wow. Meher said it best. We were sitting by the riverside, next to that damned half-fish, half-lion statue that keeps vomiting bile colored water into a bile-colored river. We were down half a bottle of wine in about twenty-five minutes and were starting to lose what little coherence we managed to function on as a unit. If Anya was my soul, Meher was very much my heart. And right now, my heart was spewing the vilest similes about love, particularly about a certain conspicuously absent semi-boyfriend. She slammed her wine goblet on the table emphatically and gestured wildly towards the sky – mumbling something about credentials. I remember asking her to shut up and pass me my smokes. She did. And then went into the longest answer for a non-existent question known to man. He was perfect on paper. She was right. I never told her that, I don’t think I ever told her how many times she was right. I think my nasty temperament and my complete disdain for most of humanity gave me some morbid license to pass insanely bad judgment that no one really called me on. But Meher was what I could never hope to be. A genuinely sweet person. And she was right, more than even she believed. She had called this one. He was beautiful, tall, intelligent, from a “good” family and (ohmyGOD) could sing pretty much professionally. But he was also insecure, distant and a complete commitment- phobe.  Which I only discovered after falling in like with him. And trust me, that was a lot for me. To care for someone who could possibly – actually more than probably hurt me? That was classic. It was true bravery on my part. Medal-worthy. Really.

               So, long story short – it didn’t work. What do you mean what else? It didn’t work. I stopped feeling what little I had felt at an amazingly rapid rate and then I left. You try conducting a conversation with a corpse. I wasn’t being “closed up” or “non-communicative” or whatever other bullshit term you want to slap on my silence. I was just very dead on the inside and I think that is the scariest thing for another human being to see. To witness someone decompose right before you eyes.                           

               Loved him? I don’t know. I don’t think so. I think the attraction was in the fact that he didn’t love me – that he was the anti-thesis of Aaron. Practical, dramatic, absent. It made me feel completely insecure and I adored it. If he had let me in, if he had told me he loved me – I think I would have run, well – I think I would have walked screaming. Did I mention I’m not good with people?         

I think the problem with God is that he knows me too well. And I know nothing about him. So all in all, not the most reciprocal of relationships. I want to believe. I think I’d be lucky if I believed. Faith is for the fortunate. I mean, what’s safer that faith? You would never feel pain, you could always see through the darkest moments in life – because you could tell yourself this is just a pit-stop in some random cosmic race that we are pre-destined to run. The light at the end of some unending, depressingly beautiful tunnel. Of course, that could just be a train. Look, I think that this whole thing is very simple. If God did exist, we would know. What would be the point in hiding from us for so long. And look at what he made! I mean, I tried to paint Ganesh faces when I was 18 and Meher was convinced I was harboring a slightly autistic, crippled cousin under my bed. Look at everything around us. Ok, look at that tree. It’s a sandalwood, right? I mean, wouldn’t you want to take credit for that? I would. I think I did once. It helped that I was volunteering at
SANA. You can tell a junkie anything, it was pretty much heaven for me. My chest hurts, I think I smoked too much. Why, because it’s all I have. So in all honestly, the only place I have seen your absentee God was in my Mother’s eyes. And then I prayed because I believed in her. I wish you could have met my Mother. I swear, people would tell me I looked just like her, but I never saw it. She was so beautiful and so strong. A little crazy, but I guess that’s to be expected. I don’t think you can be truly gorgeous and completely sane. It drives you to madness. The constant judgment, the expectations, the anger. I have, well, I had a friend. She was that kind of beautiful. The kind that used to turn people to incredible acts of cruelty. But she was the sweetest thing. She didn’t believe in God either. I think she used to see God in my eyes. I miss her. She’s one of the only things I miss about that life. You don’t know what its like to be completely removed from yourself around another person. That is safety. I guess that’s faith. She loved me, can you believe that? She always told me that she couldn’t understand why I didn’t love myself. I guess she didn’t know me the way that I did. But she knew enough – and I loved her for that. It was the ultimate hypocrisy. I loved her for loving something that I never could bring myself to accept. I wonder what she thinks of me now. I wonder if she even thinks about me. We said we would grow old together – it was the most romantic idea, true love. The purest, most platonic – unselfish love. Do you have a smoke?

For the record, I was incredibly tired and a little hungry. It does work as an excuse, especially when you consider what else I could have thrown at you – the three beers for example. Not literally thrown. I meant it metaphorically. Yes, I know you take things literally. Fine. Whatever. So there I was, on the way home – tired and hungry. It hard being a little drunk – especially when you’re expected to make witty conversation with people you just want to get away from. Far away. I think that was the purpose of the beer. I like Stella. Recent discovery – its lighter than regular beer! I think. Isn’t it? Well, anyways, I had the beer and some random tandoori chicken dinner thing. It was red. Dripping, dripping red. I could have sworn it was screaming redrum. That was a scary book. But you don’t read. So, I was telling myself, I shouldn’t eat this chicken, because my eyes will swell up and I might see him later and I don’t want to look like all my frustration had bubbled up in the sacs of my eyes. Right? But I did eat it, because I was pretty hungry then too, and it was there and I figured, I couldn’t be bothered to explain my allergies to four complete strangers. Strangers. That’s a funny word. Because in truth, no one felt stranger than me that night. You know that feeling you get when you’re uncomfortable? When it feels like your insides are stretching against themselves and all you want to do is loosen your skin? Like when you think you’re smiling, but everyone is looking at you like – are you ok? Why do you look so – strained. Yeah. I was definitely feeling some strain. Because I cant take the judgments and the back talk the discussion about other peoples lives. I mean, each one of us has our own demons and problems. Like what I did to Aaron. I mean, that wasn’t very nice. Or very fair. I was thinking – you know how when you love someone, when you want someone – you cannot even begin to understand how they can lead normal, unaffected lives when you are burning up in your sleep. But then I realize that Aaron must have felt that when I left. He must have missed me. And I didn’t feel a thing. In fact I think I felt relieved. He must have spent nights thinking about me – about my hair and my smile and my fingers. I mean, that’s what people do, right? Think about things that have nothing to do with the people they love. Love. That’s actually quite a joke. So Aaron missed me, and I missed nothing. And I will miss someone who doesn’t miss me. And I will wonder how he could miss all the torment emanating from my corner of the universe. Interesting, really. How we spend all this energy on things that will eventually to nothing but hurt us. What if we took all that time and effort and built schools for retarded little kids instead? Then we’d have a well-educated retarded workforce. And possible a more coherent Special Olympics. What?! Ok, fine. But its true. So, I was three beers down, tired, hungry and very very bored. Well, no. Bored suggests that I wasn’t stimulated. I was definitely stimulated. Just by all the wrong feelings. Nervousness, anxiety, insecurity. And I was terrified I would see him later and my eyes would look like I was going rounds with a bastardized little boxer. That so makes sense. Anyways. I was also terrified I wouldn’t see him – I mean, then I’d have to sit and rationalize what I was feeling and what he wasn’t feeling and whether or not I should walk away. My neurosis is palpable, no? So, I was confused and not at all at peace. Peace seems like such an unattainable concept sometimes. I mean, how do you quieten a mind.  It’s a mini-universe. A microcosm of all the chaos in existence – right inside of me. I can hardly make a relationship work, do you really think I can harness the power of all of existence. Yeah, no. Do you think I miss Aaron? A little? Maybe just the friendship? It’s all so hard. Anyways, I was so sure there was a point to this.————————————————————————————————————————————————                                The happiest that I have ever been? Ok, let me first denounce this incessantly sweet notion of happiness and how it, for some reason, is the ultimate rung on some invisible ladder of accomplishment we are all supposed to be climbing. I’ve been happy. And I’ve been fucking miserable. And let me tell you – the sadness was a lot more real, a lot more comforting and a hell of a lot more permanent than the sing-along version of reality. Why would you want to be in a state of constant fear – paranoia, that something might change – the warm tinglings of irreverent joy might desert you and husk the bullshit from the cloak of armor we call “humanity.” What?! It’s not pessimistic. It’s not even a judgment, really. Call it an observation. It’s just how I feel. Life is too short to spend it being happy. I think that if we learn to accept the fact that we are all just naturally more inclined to a deep-seated melancholy and chances are, are going to find ourselves in state of wanting to just let it all go more often than not, we’d be a happier tribe. Then we’d have something to sing about. But you were asking about the happiest I have, in theory, ever been. I wonder if I have really ever be .. yes, I DO digress. Alright. Happiness. I think it was the day that I started smoking. No! I’m being perfectly serious – let me explain this. Ok. So, everything around us is a social construct, right? Time, age, intelligence – even love to a large extent. We act a certain way because we have to, not necessarily because we are listening to the age-old chiming of some demented biological clock. I mean, who knows better than we do when we need to eat, shit, fuck? Apparently priests, doctors and Oprah. You can laugh. I’m telling you – everything around us has been created. From the way we interact, to the way we live, to the way we lead out our entire fucking existence. Take for example, kids. If there was ever an example of what we’re supposed to be, what we were meant to be – it lives in children. Just look at them! They talk when they want to, sleep when they want to, act out the most savage fantasies (all inherent, all under the surface) when they want to. It’s only when judgment and discretion creep into the picture that they start to question what they are feeling and what they should be feeling and how they should be feeling it. That’s why I started to smoke. Of course it makes sense. It’s a slow suicide. I wanted to do something so disgusting, so destructive, so obviously bad for me, so incredibly hard to let go off – because I could. You know? Because at the end of the day, no matter who tells me its going to kill me, no matter who knows I’m going to die a very slow and very painful death – I chose it. I am shitting on the youth of my happy pink lungs and telling them – whether or not they like it, I’m in control. And I’m willing to give them up for my remarkably common, but exponentially implicit death. Sorry, did you want oceans and windows. I have those memories too. But they all seem so tied up with who I used to be, who I gave up being. You know what the funniest thing is? I gave up myself before I gave up the cigarettes. Long before. I guess some things just make you happier than others.  

I used to go down to the basement to smoke – it was the only ritualism I ever really allowed for. Get into the office, park my shit, flip on my laptop so that it would load – dig my i-pod, 2 cigarettes, my pink and wood lighter and my access card from the screaming chaos of my bag – and head down to the open air, quiet, dark bottom floor of the towering building I was starting to refer to my “hell away from home’.  Adrienne used to wait for me at the pantry with the sole purpose of calling out – “Time for your vitamins?” every time I rushed past her. I always thought she had a rather unfulfilled life.I loved the feel of the damp, cool concrete against the rough soles of my feet. I had never been much of a pedicure baby. Pedicures were a part of my scant bag of date tricks. When I really wanted to impress a guy – I would go paint my toes. Watch with what must have been a disconcerting amount of morbid fascination as she would scrape pencil-shaving shaped skin off the heel of my foot. It was a truly empowering experience. Soft feet equaled desirable in my head – so did straight hair. Meher always knew when I was going for a date, it was the only time I lined my eyes, wore heels and wiggled my toes at her ever. I think she thought I was insane, something about inner beauty and breath mints. I never understood her aversion to the smell of tobacco – I loved it. In every life after this one, I want to be someone else. It scares me – the concept that we recycle our bodies, but remain the same on the inside. I don’t want to be me for another hundred years. I hardly want to me for the next three years (I have a self-decided expiration date, we dispose of everything that has started to decompose, why not my heart?). I never quite understood the universal obsession with life and death that I see around me. Why can’t certain things be as black and white as they seem? We live, we enjoy it seldomly and then we die, hopefully relatively painlessly. And then it’s done. Right. Why the incessant drive to try and stay young. What is youth. Youth is the one place that you make indelible mistakes – the kind of mistakes that you wear on your skin for the rest of you life. As you get older, you get numb, you grow more skin, you heal all the raw cities in the geography of your existence that didn’t come protected at birth. In age, we find peace. Theoretically. I think that if people were as concerned about making what is inside them worth being present, there would be more peace. More calm. More peaceful, calm, fat people. All this, incidentally, was prompted by the butterfly on the wall. I was smoking, listening to whatever my ipod decided to shuffle my way – just thinking, when I saw her. She was beautiful. At first glance. I felt nothing, no fear, no disgust. She was all the shades of brown that I could think of. And very still, which automatically endeared her to me. Not a movement. But as I got closer, I saw all the small flaws you miss from five steps away. A small, fat hairy body, feelers that were constantly flaying at the air, holes in feathery wings. She was every woman I knew. Gorgeous at a glance, a monstrosity at closer inspection.

She sat erect, cross-legged and irredeemably unflustered – under the sweltering shade of the twisting sandalwood tree. Pale, but for the warm sweep of an almond blush that administered itself, lovingly, to the arches of her cheeks – she inhaled the painted air slowly; folding in the heavy evening with gentle, arresting breaths. Lush colors swirled haltingly within her lungs – she could sense the buoyant greens and the musky browns indelibly tracing the highways of her delicate capillaries, washing her tumescent sadness with a mischievous candor, replicating a microcosmic forest in the airy desert of her lungs. She was fadingly aware of the dark lake that lay splayed at her feet, like a densely perforated carpet – nearly black in the absconding, filtered light. It reverberated through her – the ageless sky, that seemed confused with its ashen look of cloud; the castigated earth, sullen in its ancient reminiscing of purer times, the quiet lake. With its brackish intent, huddling close to the warm indents of her knees, she could feel it try to pry the dryness from her bones. Her eyes snapped open – ending the maddening orchestra of color that had been climatically building up inside of her. Someone is watching me. Rolling her numb tongue in its toothy cage, she relaxed the straight line of her back – undulating vertebra upon vertebra, uncoiling the strict precision of her spine till she was supine, her dark hair unfurled in the florid veins of the forest floor. Someone is waiting for me. Following the albino curves of the branches of the sandalwood as they reached for the half-caste moon, she arched her back languidly, casting tiny ripples that ran like fractures through the mossy surface of the lake. She had been born of this tree, was more a part of it than she was a part of anything else, more at home in the shadows of its too-white bark than in the marble and alabaster palace he had built for her. He had built around her. She let the moments pass, fully aware of the vulnerability of her exposed neck, the inviting contours of her small body as she lay, on her back, leaning into the glassy promise of the black water. She stared into the large, oval eyes – inches from her own, blinking rapidly to keep beads of lake out of her vision. Leave me. She wasn’t sure who the growl was directed at, but it slipped from her throat, rough and earthy, scattering the remaining morsels of calm shrouding her solitude. It was an unwelcome intrusion, she felt the warm boughs of her sandalwood pull away from her, as if realizing that she was less tree and more human – no, less than human – something feral. With an irritated sigh, she pulled herself up onto her elbows, all hair, all eyes. She scanned the lake, shaking her head to clear the truant droplets that had snaked their way into the corners of her eyes. Where are you.Here. The abruptness of his response chilled her. Then an old fury rumbled in her bones. This was the only time she had been allotted, for herself. All for herself. There was no reason for his intrusion, no cause for his suspicion. Had she not been so severely wounded, she would have leapt towards the feel of him, found him in the darkness, torn him to pieces. Her chest heaved slowly, rising and falling to the gait of her rage. All color fled from within her, trembled at the ferocity of the darkness that had consumed her, that defined her. She drew her knees in, surprised at the coolness of her skin. The brassy water shimmered its discreet laughter and she pulled her toes from its grasp – rubbing them into the familiar texture of the ground. Come out.     He vanished as quickly as he had come. So quickly that she wondered if he had even been there to begin with. If he had ever even existed, as she once had, a long time ago. She looked around, almost bewildered – a child-like curiosity settling into the corners of her eyes. Come out? The stretch had left her and she felt loose, almost liquid in her movements. She knew she was unsettling, with the almost colorless almond of her large oval eyes and the translucency of her buttermilk skin. How could something so delicate … ? She had heard the unfinished question more times than she cared to remember. There was nothing delicate in her. It was hardly her fault that she looked this – helpless. She knew that they knew that It ran through her blood. It gathered in every crevice of her being. It was what she dreamt, what she sweated out of her golden pores, what she was. There was nothing she could do to change, not that she wanted to – change. All she wanted was to be reabsorbed into her tree. The same damn tree that was now leaning away from her as if her small, sharp nails were saws that were going to ratchet into its very being. An orphan, an orphan, an orphan from birth. Every muscle in her body tensed. There it was again. That uncanny sensation of being poked, prodded surreptitiously by a pair of eyes. This time, she knew exactly whose eyes they were. Aakaash.