this little light of mine, part two

i'm not sure about body-image and men and what the issues are like there, but women talk real nasty to themselves. they will say the most awful things about their bodies. when i was out shopping one day i ran into someone i know trying out clothes. she asked me what i thought of her trousers and we talked about the timeless trial that is finding the right pair. then she says, and you know i find trousers especially difficult to find because i have such a grotesque figure.

i'm not sure what a grotesque figure is but her's didn't look like one. but this is a good, if extreme, example of the kind of things women say. oh god, my legs are so podgy. my pores are visible from outer space. my nose is funny, my toes are knobbly, my hair is a disaster, my neck is too short, and that all-time favorite, i'm so fat.

now fat is a great favorite and there are many ways to use it. i feel fat, i look fat, i am fat, i'm getting fatter, i'm huge, i'm bloated, i'm a blimp. being technically and immodestly fat, i used to be surprised at these declarations. because they always ensue from the mouth of a person who isn't fat at all. you don't see too many fat people moaning about being fat. mostly because we don't like to talk with our mouths full, but also because we think you are mental.

earlier i was perplexed by this verbal accumulation of fat. but now it seems more to me like vanity. like that girl in school who would always top class and then make a scene about how she only got 98% and how her mother would be soo disappointed. people like that should be given a pinch, it's the only civilised solution.

i get how it is satisfying to pile on the ugliness sometimes. but oh my god, woman, get a grip. when did it become ok to be so damn mean to yourself? are we taught to do this as little girls? to constantly seek and magnify weaknesses? do we feel like perhaps we're beginning to feel too good about ourselves and are scared this won't last so puncture it before it gets you? like it will help you stay grounded to focus on the negatives. like you need to reassure someone less magnificent than you and this is your gift to them, the wilful destruction of pretty. but your beauty persists, and so you must too.

or does it scare you so much, your gorgeousness, that you won't look at it till it puts on a cloak and shuffle?

it hasn't caused any heart attacks yet, but i love my body. oh, it could do with some tiny improvement and the way it is now weighs me down more than i will currently admit. i suffer from clinical depression and over the period of one year did a lot of not nice things to my body, including taking a lit cigarette to it over and over and over. it made sense at the time. i've stopped doing it and it still makes sense.

and for all that, i love my body. it feels heavenly under a hot shower, it squirms under the spread of honey (or indeed, the thought of the spread of honey), it allows me to hug, which is crucial to my world domination plans. i'm told it's a good kisser and i know it's made someone very very happy in its time. and i happen to know it has nothing to do with how hot i look in trousers. or how miniscule my butt is or how perky my boobs. because if that's what makes you sexy, then we might as well all pack up and go home and curl up in a corner and die. and if i'm not ready to do that, then not one of you others has any right to be. so there.

this little light of mine, part 1

if there's one type of show i would most want to be studio audience to - apart from oprah's christmas giving away goodies special - it's her makeover shows. i don't even have to know the people getting made over to cheer with the best of them. i get so swept up in the project, screaming, often sobbing when the person steps out from behind the curtain looking all shy and excited and occasionally even working it - my favorite - in the midst of all that applause and oprah going, oh ma gawd!

makeover shows make me cry harder than any others because i know how powerful it can be to hand someone a new perspective on themselves. it's not easy to fully comprehend how profoundly life-changing a new haircut or better-fitting bra can be. you have to be there. you have to have gotten rid of a habit that like linus' security blanket has followed you around for years and that you don't need any longer. i really do think our defense mechanisms sometimes manifest themselves most stubbornly in how we wear our hair, clothes, makeup. so a makeover can make you feel naked and raw.

when i cut off my hair some years ago, it got the worst response from the world. except for friends, people mostly just gasped and said, what happened to your hair! like it had been in an accident or something. and i would say, it's shorter, that's all.

but that was not all. suddenly i did not have this mass of stuff on my head to carry around and watch out for. i did not have to plait it and washing my hair wasn't such a production. we're talking radical shift here - it went from brushing my hip to tickling my neck. my mother would look at it wonderingly everyday and go, wow it's so short.

as for me, i knew in the flash of my hairdresser's scissors that i would never ever grow my hair again. ever. it was a homecoming.

but you don't have to have chopped off your hair and broken your mother's heart to understand how this feels. any old fashion revelation will do. it has the liberating effect of ripping off a corset. and tearing it to shreds. and burning it and dancing around the fire and jiggling in released glee. to realise you don't need all those layers of cloth. to see you look pretty damn alright in a sleeveless top. to understand that pink looks good on you, so stop fighting it, people.

be told

you can pick it through the gash, delight in its morbid gleam, smear congealment on fingers and chin.
spread it on tar, scrape a circle that meets imperfect, stub it under toe and still have enough to spear.
but if love teaches you one thing, it's to keep between the lines.

held

peaches are the flavor of the season and i've been absorbing them at every pore. a peach is soft and sweet, hence meeting the requirements of my recently bereaved gums. while its flesh is all pulpness and amiability, its skin has a itchy coarseness to keep things from getting too monotonous.

does that fit here? to write about a peach, you must become the peach. sour at the teeth, but osmosing sweetness. like every cell in your mouth is playing catch with a palm of sugar. you don't know where the sweetness will spring from next, and that's the beauty of the peach. a clefted globe with fire in the centre, plush silence all around and a surface of velvet fuzz.

would you suspect that wicked prune at the pit to be fertile, much less a prisoner?

ice cream delirium

yesterday i had four teeth pulled right out of my head. four plus one supernumery growing out of the side of my mouth, like some freak weed.

i was lying on the chair with three men bent over my mouth with masks on. stuff was flying out in a spray, something was dripping down my gums, and a machine went whrrrr. often they would say to me, excellent you are doing very well, as though there is some special skill involved in lying there with your mouth open.

we'll just let that one rest, ok?

the sad thing about being on anesthetic is that you never really have the luxury of being detached although you often have the view. like i could see my blood on the doctor's glove, i could feel the tug of the thread as he sewed, i heard the crack of the bone as it gave way. but i could not just sit back and enjoy the show. while the child inside me went, wow a clean break, and tasteless goo flooding my mouth!, the cynical teenager knew, yeah but man, are you going to pay.

and i did and i did. first i had to tell the autowallah where to take me and through my numbed lips i managed an authoritative, babaka. he understood, miraculously. and also understood my directions along the way. bliffth, dhefth. and then i met nisha who told me a brilliant story about taking harigopalaunty shopping, and i couldn't do justice to it because everytime i laughed it felt like the stitches would tear. that was very sad and i got home in such a foul mood that every door was banged at least twice. i cannot stand pain and i really cannot tolerate discomfort.

so i bled on my pillow but the tears wouldn't come because they weren't convinced this was a special enough occasion. but it was. the doctor told me, you might wake up with a slight trickle of blood in your mouth, but that's nothing to worry about. i don't mind the trickle but the taste is so awful. and it's sickeningly familiar, the taste of blood.

after i held my head up and swallowed, gagging all the while, i would have a few moment's peace and then again, a little pool of salt and cement at the back of my tongue. if i ignored it, it would harden drawing every nerve ending to the back of my throat, sucking so hard in their urgency that my throat started to hurt.

i don't know why the taste of blood should be of shame but it is. if the flow of shame had a consistency, a color, a flavor, it would be this. like tears with memory and heavy steps. all its piquancy dulled with routine. tears gone musty and blooming with rust.

slippery palms

sometimes your hands get so restless, it's impossible to hold them within the pages of a book. all the time i held respectable employment rainy days like this would make me think well-worn worker-ant thoughts. thoughts involving curling up and with a book and with the steaming coffee. it's sad how handy wistfulness has become. and how evocative its shorthand appears.

i long for things i don't recognise the comfort of. i don't curl up with a book, i prop it at up an unhealthy distance and often hold my feet splayed with concentration. i'm not a happy reader. i'm caffeine-intolerant and rainlight is lousy to read by. so what i really want to do on a rainy day is not to seep into some memorable storyboard, but to oversleep, meet a dear friend, get under bright lights, and play a board game. or watch tv or go to the movies. what i want to do is ignore the rain and have it surprise me everytime i step out.

the rains are a joyful people. if you need any proof of this watch how happily raindrops die on your windshield. they slap and sting and have teeth of silver. they wink at the sun, much to his embarassment, and when pierced by his gaze draw soppy multi-colored nothings on your eye. but colors run in water and that's why you sometimes see segments of rainbows lying misshapen on the road. the rains will destroy anything so long as they can get a poem out of it.

and these are the silver people we sing to. when they come we hold out our hands, necks, tongues. we delight in the slapslapslap while little saplings are flooded out of their homes and little worms coaxed out and trampled under. we're so intoxicated by their perfume, our senses go out of whack. receptors get soggy, mildewed. silverfish in our hair. shake em out and ask yourself this the next time you look out and see crystals suspended in the air, smashing on the street - how can anything so immortally eager to splinter and die hold on to something as finite as your heart.

gorging

the past 13 days have been a feast. food, music, movies, and soulsistah for sweet sweet company. my best friend is in town and we're in recharge mode because both our batteries had been bled dry in the past nine months.

are you the best friend kind? i always have been. i've had a different best friend every year of school. multiple best friends if my place was changed around during the course of the year. while they lasted they were fun and uncomplicated. then i would move and we'd unclasp hands with a snap. what do they call it, the elasticity of youth.

nobody said what ever happened to us, we don't talk like we used to. and you didn't go and say hello every lunchbell just to be polite. birthdays were forgotten, phone numbers scrambled away from memory, and inside jokes were relegated to polite unbroken dust.

then the grasp became cunning. in college friends broke up from the stream to form eddies. you get caught up and you catch in turn. sitting on our spot on the steps, we understood things and people. we found a lot of things very funny, even without chemical aid. i didn't have a best friend anymore, i had peoples.

but one of those peoples spoke in a tone that occasionally, then more often, broke away from the common frequency. a distraction, like a storm or a crossconnection. so i turned the dial till the voice crackled clear. it said, say that again and say it slower.

she didn't understand everything, which she continues to do to this day. but she listens like i make sense. and she laughs at all the right places. this is very important because sometimes i miss the punchline. we turn each other upside down, inside out, and go through this whole business bassackwards, simply because our internal compasses are both currently petrified.

recharge mode does many things for you. it fills you up and makes you drunk. it lends you a feline instinct for warmth. it condenses all thought process to a drawn and spiritual aah. but slaked thirst has a better memory of drought. and so a keener anticipation of it.

and darling that's the only good thing about missing you; what it weighs in pain, it lacks wholly in imagination. loneliness has no past at all.