She would always write in print, only recently turning to QWERTY. But, looking down at the scribblings she made, after the Benadryl infusion hit, her face scrunched toward her nose. They mirrored the plethora of scenes from films, the maniac scribbling their intrusive thoughts in a composition book before cocking the shotgun and rushing the mall.
“If someone close to me were found dead, skull collapsed from continuous impacts to the concrete, this notebook will turn me into a suspect.”
Then again, once they see her newly acquired frailty, they will leave her be.
The looks she gets these days have changed so dramatically. In her youth, she never feared a stranger’s eye, she paid no mind to what they saw, what they’d say to her about what they saw. She didn't mind the verbal punches thrown by her siblings. She didn't mind the neighborhood kids who threw rocks at her while escaping the catholic school she attended. She didn’t mind the white girls at her college that asked her “do niggers grow tails at night?” She mastered the polite, straight lipped smile that defuses the explosion they anticipated from the statement they made, taking away the joy of being rude.
But the looks she gets these days drags her inside in a way that she’d never experienced…the cluttered home that it currently is inside.
Darkened by thrift shop curtains tacked on the windows, a wooden floor that weeps when you walk over the many lumps, spiderwebs caked in dust clinging to corners no one cares to reach, stacks of paper no one cares to sort, filth covered walls no one cares to wipe, a low dull hum in the air that no one cares to locate and end. If only it could just end. What happens when you put it off, when you promise, and then ignore it? It doesn’t wait; it only grows. And that walk to the bed covered in blankets quilted, crocheted, weighted and thrown becomes more of a quest, needing tools and stamina and strength of mind to make it. You had to start ignoring, replacing tangible with theoretical.
She nests in those many blankets, piles them atop her like armor. Her hands feel like ten-pound weights, as does the pen she lifts onto her lap to scribble. It could all be insane rambling or it could become cohesive when read by neutral eyes. But it must mean something, existence means something. Her eyelids start to droop, the Benadryl, turning her sight into funhouse mirror images. She can’t even read back what she wrote, she can’t even recall where to place the notebook so she can rest. She just lets her eyes close, lets the clutter collapse around her, imagines the detective rubbing his crooked index finger over his chin dragging his eyes over her chicken scratch.
Love becomes mundane. No one told Aura that.
You look over at them, they’re the 10000th sunset, the fiftieth bowl of your mother’s special stew, the eightieth day of the weight of your favorite sweater on your shoulders. Love shouldn’t become that, it should always cause a spark, a jolt out of the routine. But it doesn’t, it folds into the routine like an egg into batter.
Those eyes, the tremor of his voice, the width of his palms, the pride in his stride...tedious. And while we share this reality, somehow, we can’t make each other verbally aware of meeting this stage.
He’s the light of her life, the reason she wakes and the comfort that guides her sleep. He’s the inspiration for her continuation of existence, always the man she saw the first time she discovered she couldn’t live without him.
When she wakes and sees him in the same place he was in when she fell asleep. When she sees that specific sigh that leads to the expel of gas, through the throat or the colon, when he emotes with a micro expression lead by the curl of the corner of his lip or the twitch of the edge of his brow…it assures her he’s alive and can relax, can exhale…and go back to being absolutely bored by him.
These days, when the aches feel like her muscles are strangling her bones, when the nausea dances around her uvula she appreciates that he hasn’t changed. He’s still boring. She doesn’t want him waiting on her, weeping for her, pitying her. She wants him to be the man he was before they learned she was dying. It lets her know their love has reached that comfort, that mundanity, that stage where even a fresh drop in this stagnant pool won’t cause a ripple.
It will take more than her diagnosis to erode this rock. And while she must carry the weight of that rock, she adds it to a special place on her back, so it can feel special in addition to the rocks that also refuse to erode no matter what she did, does or will do.
If she survives, slowly dies, the weight will remain, solidify even more, become growths that pull nerves and muscle into their protrusions so removal will kill a part of her. she’ll become one of those women who lean into their knees because of that invisible stress that tore their spinal strength to shreds.
Aura started her “escaping” from her family, the sting of cutting glances and sharp dismissing responses…she feels as though she's been expelled. So, she takes that walk, the one where each step feels like she's resting the neck of her foot slowly onto an upturned blade. She sits on those porch steps and waits for the cardinal.
Her sister loved cardinals, she'd sit outside and wait for one to show, she'd gasp in that way kids do, even if it showed up twice in the same day. Her sister was so easy to please, and attempting to extinguish that pleasure was like trying to erode rock using only your tongue and hers was heavy and dry with fatigue from trying to diminish her sisters joy.
It'd always been difficult for her to find and maintain joy the way her sister did. And she'd mentioned that, how that reality made her feel like she was born with pieces missing or was robbed of them some time in her youth. But her sister persisted in her youthful exuberance and, in turn, preceded to absorb all the vitriol thrown back at her.
When the cardinal shows up, it’s weight causing a gentle drop of the branch it lands on, she stares up at it, tries to manufacture some of that joy her sister always had for the bird. But it’s just a bird. One with red feathers. It wasn’t always around before but it shows up every day now. Perches on a branch of a tree in the yard and appears to stare at her. The end of its beak a point, it’s squawks a mocking laugh.
It knows she can’t find joy, can’t even create joy for its sudden appearance.
But what did she enjoy? What caused her own inner child to shove its way to the front and gape in awe?
Beautiful people in beautiful clothes singing and dancing, vocals whipping and twirling with the same grace as their bodies. When those leading men and women showed up on screens big and small, colored or black and white, when those choreographed smiles beamed over how breathless and exhausted they must be to create the perfected and polished product she’s consumed since her youth.
She wishes she could meet them all, those people, those giants that stomped through her mind her entire life. She wishes she could congratulate them.
They’re eternal.
Like this cardinal. There could be a new one showing every time she comes out here, but it’s still just one kind of bird, eternally shaped and painted. The same every time.
She should seek her joy in things eternal, things that death wont destroy or disappear.
She should go back inside, sit still and listen.
Yes, she won’t talk. She’ll listen.