eulogy for flesh

Wishful thinking is a blackhole of lost time. Mental illness and neurological disability have robbed so much of my youth that even at somehow 20, I continue to bound and lurch aimlessly in the dark, in hapless search of a way to reassemble my self, the fragments of identity, meaning, a future with a future. Have you ever mourned a reflection? Ached for the person that could’ve been? Survivors of violent trauma often speak of a distinct before, where they were once something else, someone else. Like dusk light, gently elapsing across the soft warming horizon – I, growing, roots forming and interweaving. Childhood nourishment is a core foundation for the thriving adult. Core. An apple, yellowed, rotted, seeds useless. That is all I am now in these woods; in days-old stained cotton clothing, stray branches in my seldom brushed hair. Who could I have been if they hadn’t shorn me, emptied me, beaten me into pulp, left to fester under that July sun. How much could I have created? Where would I be today? Could I loved her? Would he still have left me? Could I have created a kinder life? Perhaps I must learn to forgive myself for not knowing. For doing what I did to survive. In the end, these pains are too heavy to carry, and they have made me too small.

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A summer of a mother’s bruises. Curtains meant to shield instead caged me in furtive reminders of my place in this violent, giving world. Dirtied crème with subtle golden embroidery. Heinous and radiant, an illuminant foreground to bring out the hands and hungry eyes of the men in the house beside mine, beady phone cameras callously, shamelessly trained at the legs I dared to bare in – forgive my grotesque language – the “comfort” of my “home.” They drank me in, nothing new, starved hyenas lapping away at the fresh dissected body of a promising gazelle, ravaging her lively scarlet innards, split, glistening, and rotting in the grasslands scorched by the ever warming, ever ruthless climate of things. 

“Whore. Magi. Ruined. Noshto. Disobedient. Beyadob. Horrendous. Bichhirri. Sickening. Joghonno. The very breed of girl today is evil. Ajkaler meyeder jaattai kharap.”

My body is the nation. I have spent my whole life at war with it. It has jailed me, silenced me with machetes and arbitrary numerical measures of wealth, drowned out actual need in favour of suppressing and short term earning. Gratification is a sunken collarbone. Merit is a curved hip, ribs you can feel under your anemic hands. If I could collect all the hair I’ve lost and torn out and had torn out and left to splinter red, grow malnourished, fall in thick tufts over these last few years — could I create the woman who I killed to become the one I am today? 

The music of a running tap is still a blade of a memory, an ugly discordant static that I used too many evenings and afternoons to cushion the sounds of self implosion, emptying my young stomach with acidic fingers, knuckles rosily contused by my own teeth, an aching jaw bitter with bile, the arms that will never leave me, their healed skin rugged and sorrowful. Mirrors were hallucinogens. I could’ve weighed air — and I did, to be honest, long enough for my blood to forget how to produce enough iron, for my nails to grow translucent, thin, brittle — but I know it still would not have been enough for her. Technology has not yet been invented to make the blind see. 

Nothing became my name at birth, and less and less throughout my adolescence. How does one stomach the feeling of knowing you are unseen? Knowing you are made, violently. small? That your very being offends strangers, uncles, bus windows, sidewalks, dining rooms, to the point of a twisted, virulent lust? How do you stomach being forced to run on your knees, speak with a shorn tongue, bleed into lavish red georgette? When worth is an orna, a scarf, where do you begin and end as a person?All I can do now, all that is left, is to mourn — there is no altar for this kind of death, no more courts to neglect justice in. Merely I, and this prison I have been made to call my skin.