In This Love You Are Like a Knife with which I Explore Myself*
I was shaking. I gripped the handle of my spade and tried to focus my thoughts on what was in front of me. I was standing in a shabby kitchen garden decorated with strings of flashing red Christmas lights. As the lights frantically switched on and off with their false sense of importance, I noticed that some of them were broken, creating little pockets of darkness around the tired looking plants shivering in the chilly night breeze. I looked around and carefully selected a spot near one of the windows of the house. Good, I said to myself. She can see it everyday when she drinks her stinking coffee in the morning. I started to dig.
How had we got here? Aster and I? I struggled with arranging everything in a linear chain of events. Everything was a jumble in my head; pockets of darkness, as if someone had broken a few of the Christmas lights of my memory. “It’s quite normal to experience these kinds of side-effects,” the man at the clinic had said, “it shall pass in a few weeks.” I could remember some things though. The stubborn memories that remained played over and over in my head. And in that painfully bright technicolor movie, I would see Aster. Aster smiling at me from the corner of a crowded room. Aster breathing into my ear. Aster tucking her toes into the rolled up ends of my denims, curling her body into mine, and asking if I would make dinner, please, although it was her turn.
We used to live together in a loft right across the Mestora fountains. It was an old neighbourhood criss-crossed by narrow lanes and frequented by gangs of children twirling shiny pocket knives. Our home had three walls and several species of spiders. But we loved it all. We had each other and we had our things—little things. I bought the electric gas stove; she sourced the minibar-esque refrigerator from a friend. She also ‘borrowed’ cushions from her parents’ house for the couch I found at the flea market. The cushions had ugly flowers embroidered on them. They looked like muddy roses to me.
She smelled like flowers. My Aster. Not flowers arranged neatly in a vase. But freshly cut screaming flowers, helplessly leaking the sweet, bloody fragrance of their bosoms at the moment of their death. I would watch her drool unsexily on her pillow as she slept, fascinated by the shape of her open mouth. I would rummage through her clothes when she was away; looking for something loose fitting to sleep in. She would leave me kisses on the bathroom mirror after she had showered. We would babysit our friends’ apartments, dogs, fish, and children when they were away. She hated combing her hair. I would try to run my fingers through it anyway. On Sunday mornings, I would pretend to sleep while listening to her call my name, her voice heavy with laziness and love. Once as we came up the escalator in the subway station, I noticed a balloon shaped like Mickey Mouse’s head floating near the ceiling, trying to escape. I nudged her elbow and pointed up at the balloon, I liked showing her things. She smiled. She liked the things I showed her.
Well, maybe not every single thing. She complained about the way I would behave after I had taken the pills. Just prescription medicines I had started some years before, I really didn’t think I was taking that many. I just needed a bit of a push sometimes. But she said that I was changing and she was unhappy. She asked me to stop. She asked me to stop again and again and again with lips that tasted salty because of the tears. I tried to stop, of course I did. I tried again and again and again. But it was difficult. Especially in the mornings, I needed something just to get my day started. So I would wake up at five, and ever so quietly sneak into the tiny bathroom. After waiting for a few minutes to be sure that she was still sleeping, I would half close the door so that the light would not disturb her and hurriedly gulp down a few capsules of my guilty pleasures. Mostly just painkillers and muscle relaxants. Mostly.
Aster never came running to stop me. She did not call out to me demanding to know why the weight of my leg on top of hers had been missing for such a long time. But when I came back to bed she would always know. She would not let me hold her. She would push and scratch and leave me cold. “Go away Lester!” Angry lovemaking. Hair in my mouth. “Go away Lester!, really.”
Aster said she had packed her things. I nodded. Our ugly cushion covers had been washed and were hanging out to dry from the windows. Our books which we had collected together were untouched in their alcove near the couch. She said I could keep her refrigerator. She said she was done with us but would keep in touch. I sat down on the floor and watched ants crawling over a pile of her underwear. I nodded some more. She thought I understood, so she started dragging her suitcase down the stairs. I did not understand. And she did not keep in touch. I know she did not. I checked.
I lived by myself after she left. I went to work and ate sometimes. There was pain. I noticed that it would change colors and seemed to expand and contract with the rhythm of my breathing. Sometimes a fiery red heat would burn my skin from within, other days I would feel a sickeningly yellow hole somewhere in the vicinity of my chest, mostly everything was a brilliant nostalgic blue. The pills didn’t help much. I took them anyway, out of habit. I would still wake up early in the mornings and half shut the bathroom door, just in case.
When people asked me about her I said that we had ‘taken time off.’ But after a few months, they stopped believing me. I eventually did give up the pills. But I did not feel any different. No upsurge of energy or vitality. Instead, I felt angry. Had I really become that aloof towards her? So much so that she had to decide she was done with us? If I really thought about it, had she really explained why she was done with me? How do you get to the point of being finished with a human being? A human being you have shared your cum, and blood, and spit, and tears with? Love is not an invention that can be disassembled and put away after it gets worn-out from use, its a discovery, its an acknowledement and acceptance that you have found the one you have always been in love with, your person. How had Aster managed to fall out of love then? How had she managed to cut me out of her life completely? I didn't have the answers. I would watch my little reel of memories and drift away. I managed like this for a while.
But one night I found Aster’s flavored coffee mixes. Mocha, vanilla, and caramel (she loved flavored coffee, I hate it). I drank around six cups, two of each flavor. The next morning I chucked my half-eaten breakfast apple into the dirty cup as I hurriedly left for the office. Later, when I came home, I was terrified. The stale coffee in my mug had soaked into the flesh of the apple and somehow, it smelled exactly like Aster. Like she was sitting there on my desk, where I had left my cup. It was terrifying. I threw the apple away. I washed the cup thrice. But I could not shake the feeling of being haunted, watched even. I moved in with a friend the next day. Aster had finally taken all her possessions, which was everything. I was spent.
I was shaking again. I had been digging for about half an hour and had an oblong-shaped depression to show for it. I paused to look at the neglected mess of dirt, weeds and shriveled plants around me. I bet Aster started the garden like one of her many ‘projects.’ And like every single one of her little ventures she abandoned it. Aster had this habit as long as I could remember. She would put too much energy and enthusiasm into the beginning of everything: paintings, theater scripts, new recipes, sex, everything, and quickly get disappointed if things did not happen the way she wanted them to. And she always wanted them fast. Too fast. She said she could not wait, that delaying gratification was impossible for her. I told her this was precisely why she couldn't paint, write, cook or orgasm. She would laugh and bite my ear.
I know I belong in this garden Aster.
I belong amongst the forgotten, dying carcasses of things you had once loved and now don’t give a passing glance to as you go about your life.
I was about to resume digging when I suddenly froze, there was a sharp arc of light cutting through the red glow of the Christmas lights. I turned around and nearly bumped into Aster. She had snuck up on me, flashlight in hand, and was staring at me with makeup smeared eyes. Seeing her in front of me set off all sorts of reflexes in my body. I fought the urge to put my arms around her. I could barely stand straight. I wanted to tell her about everything, all the things she missed, all the stories I could not share with her ever since she left. But before I could open my mouth she asked, in that delightful sleepy voice:
“Lester, what are you doing with that spade, why are you digging up my garden”
“I am digging my grave Aster, I am done with myself too.”
I was about to explain more but she cut me off.
“And who is that one for ?”
(She had noticed the second spade lying on the ground next to my feet)
“For you, I thought you might enjoy helping me dig.”
“No I would not. Why are you trembling ?”
“Oh its nothing, it will pass in a few weeks”
“What will ?”
“The withdrawal”
“So you have stopped the pills ?”
“Yes, now help me dig”
But she just stood there. Unwilling, unmoving, unmoved by my presence, by what I had told her. Her indifference was violent, it felt bone crushing. My heart trembled, like a bomb strapped to my chest, eager to explode from the force of my white untouched love, my red pain, my black anger, my yellow loneliness, my blue nostalgia, the whole fucking rainbow. Everything became blurry. “Don’t cry.” Her voice seemed like it was coming from a place far away. I dropped to my knees, “Aster I…” She knelt down too, and took my hand. “Let’s stay here Lester,” she was leading me into the grave I had been digging. We laid down. She tucked her toes into the ends of my trousers like she used to.
“Let’s stay here, Lester. Let’s stay here and mourn together before we go back to being moths blinded by a morning glittering with loneliness.”
I closed my eyes and breathed in the scent of the freshly dug earth, the mild stench of the dead garden, and gathered in my arms what remained of my Aster. She kissed me, her lips felt inert. I closed my eyes anyway, and tried to remember what it used to feel like, for old times’ sake. Through my eyelids, I could see faint red dots. The Christmas lights were still flashing away while we silently held each other and buried our love in the little pocket of darkness I had dug for it.
