outta touch with tears
haven’t blogged in a while. have been out of touch with tears too. at this point in one’s life, with the caretaker government taking a long ride on all of us, i am actually out of sync with what i am supposed to do. . .i am supposed to cry. april’s closeby and i still don’t seem to be getting it. should be running away from my regulars: my reg coffee, my reg routine, my reg nagtime, my reg nausea and the rest. i should be shutting all doors to the different corridors that i run to and i should be only looking at the one single lifeline that i pursue for that one month…every year. that april, the cruellest beast of all, makes me bleed over and over again. have forgiven all, the doctors, annis’s absence, my inadequacies, but the month has remained my arch enemy. i have hated april ever since 2002. the single road that i treaded on for a year and a half which offered no exit and had confined me between two dead ends : one of diagnosis and the other of closure, has remained as my life boat without which i would have drowned in my own tears.
his partner missed him tonight. it was his nana’s birthday. while i carefully wrapped gifts for the birthday nana, i had to pack one from sharaf. after all, nana and sharaf had planned to marry and remarry the same woman: sharaf’s nanu. the partners in crime had a lot in common. therefore, celebrating without the would-have-been 11 year old would be criminal. so i gave sharaf’s nana a magnetic glass photo frame with a lovely picture of him trying to look like an 18 century warrior who’d protect his grandson from all enemies, including: women! the deal was that they would always look at women, measure their worth and then only would they chase them from their hospital beds. i say”beds” in a way that most of you reading this would take the situation as a mass hospitalization case. it was, in a way. we all shared his bed, his hospital room and therefore as he stayed in his bed and played peek-a-boo with chris and the lovely joanie, we joined him in spirit and continued feeling at home at children’s hospital in boston.
the only time i felt like an alien was when he had said goodbye in april. yet every year i run along the borders of memory and pain, water them with caution, trim them, take care of the weeds, ensure that there’s enough reminders coming in through the window, flooding loss with a graceful glow that eventually makes me realize that oblivion was hardly ever my style and that i am at my best with hourly alarms that completely disallow amnesia or comfort.
