There always seems to be some music playing.
It has been a while since I last indulged in a setting sun. I mean that as literally as it can be said.
For years, I thoroughly (and religiously) enjoyed watching the light disappear from the world. I do not mean that manically. I mean, I was never truly afraid of the darkness anyway. For around two weeks every month, I had a companion hanging solemnly in the sky, transfixed and shining when the world went dim and dark. It didn’t matter to me if I could or couldn’t see her. I knew how she shone onto the world. On special occasions, when the timing was just right sometime in the summer, she would flood my room with her moonlit glow. This was one-half of the comfort.
The other half was watching the sun, reminiscent of an orange bulb, or a freshly cracked egg yolk reserved just for carbonara making, disappearing behind the horizon, urging the stars and the planets to wake and shine. The incandescent glow of the moon would always follow. These two entities were my closest confidants. However, my two friends (who have always kept me company) do not speak to me. They simply just exist in my periphery, always aware of my existence like I am of theirs.
What I loved most about them is how closely they’ve kept me company over the course of the years. I’d like to think, that in the absence of parental love, I was worthy of something - even if it was silent. I was used to not being heard anyway. These figures have seen me through every phase of my life. Like when I paced the rooms of every single home I lived in. How they blanketed me in a sheath of light as I walked about during the ghostly hours of night time, mind racing, everyone around me tucked away in their rooms. Sleeping possibly. The doors were always shut. I would never know anyway. Then there were times when after sifting through an enormously unpleasant sandbox of anxious memories all night, I would finally rest in the heat of the mid-day. “Maybe I was never meant for the cold of the night”, I would catch myself saying out loud. I would sleep quietly in the chaos that would unfold beyond my closed doors. No din would escape me. I learned how to remain silent. No one looked for me anyway. The humid air of the afternoons would permeate from the open window, seeping in bit by bit until sweat would bead on my forehead. I would wake up in the later parts of the afternoons. I was happiest then.
I was born on a Saturday, fifteen minutes past eleven in the morning. I was meant to be an afternoon person. I loved the idea of waking up early. I just never understood peace. Maybe I was never meant for the cold of the night.
As I trekked the adventures of the days, the sun and moon dancing around me watching each move, I began thinking of the other days, when both happiness and sadness muddled into one; forming an incorrigible cacophony of expressions on my face. I’ve been told I look scary. “Do the sun and moon think of me this way?”, I wondered. They’ve seen me live many lives. Writer, creator, failure, writer, photographer, tennis player, swimmer, musician, artist, writer, creator, failure. “I wonder, do they ever look down upon me?”. I say hello to them when I can, I say goodnight when they’re around. They’ve always seen me around to the end. They’ve seen me work desk jobs, playing card games with my friends till the sky turned light blue, teasing itself into an awakeness as our eyes, bloodshot from the cigarettes and lack of rest, drooped into our laps.
This questionable constant of one after the other. Watching, watching, watching… taking shifts, watching, watching, watching…
I couldn’t help but wonder: “Why them? Why were they watching?”
I have been healthy, sad, sick, despicable, horrid, charming, and utterly human before the two mute entities circling, NO! dancing around me. It’s going to be twenty-six years. Why them?
The scent of the sweet honey candle sitting on my windowsill permeates the immediate space around me. It is easier to write this way, settling into the groove of my workspace where my pillow is pressed against the wall, making it my makeshift headrest. I am ironically writing away as my table and recently acquired Tip Ton Vitra chair stands dumbfounded to my right. The sun and the last colors of the day are setting to my left. The sky is an odd shade of lilac and a many range of blues with just a tinge of orange. There have been better days, better sunsets.
I try again at the top. I begin my first attempt at a very difficult task: remembering.
My memories are a stained patina of mixed emotions and possibilities. Here, dreams and realities dance. I could never discern. I ask myself: “Did I really take those kitchen scissors and cut my father’s jeans to shreds, him just standing there, allowing me to rip apart the denim he loved more than me? Why did he do nothing? But it wasn’t a dream. I saw them ripped later in the day. What am I not remembering here?”
It was easier to place, I think, the sun and the moon, as parental figures, than it was to ask my parents to apologize and atone for all that they have done wrong to me. The light and darkness remained benevolent. I was always taken care of anyway. I just wanted to be heard. “To be listened to”, I say to myself, “is to be loved”. And so I spoke out loud into the void. I don’t remember when I began. I just remembered speaking, as I do now. Will you listen to me, reader?
I cannot deny that the things that I do and the things that I think have always been done beyond any comparable human understanding. Trying to make sense of it would leave everyone, including myself, most times, in a state of discombobulation. So, as a means to placate my ever-heating brain, I do things and view things and think things under an imaginary blanket of comfort. The trouble arises when I begin to remember things. Remembering will have me fighting for my life, with me sinking down some self-made rabbit hole.
I hate it here. There is music playing …
Having ruminated a lot lately, I first began thinking about the importance of remembering. Beyond the flummox and ineptitude to holding onto things: people, memories, things, I settled on the violence of my past. It started off small, a question really. “Why was there so much violence involved?” I supposed, looking back at it all now, almost as though looking into a bowl holding all of everything that has happened in my life, my brain’s need to plaster all of the hurt became justified. It was best, to not remember. In my time spent alone, however, I can sometimes hear the static, the change of channels, and then suddenly, Tamil music will fill the air like the sweet honey candle on my windowsill. Or how I am reminded of the house I grew up in. Four walls, three rooms, partitioned, held up by a lot of heated emotions in a small town that rained on time every day.
“Will it rain, or, will it not?”.
This story, I would hear escaping my aunt’s lips each time we drove up north to the island we occasionally enjoyed holidaying at. We do not look back into our past anymore. It is left behind, meant to be forgotten. If I close my eyes, I can smell the fresh smell of rain radiating off the hot road, and I am reminded of the great despair that came with living with grandparents who despised each other. Then as I sink deeper into my past, I think of myself like the tiny creek my grandfather once drove me to on his motorcycle. I can only remember it. I do not know if it is real. Like the jeans, I ripped up. When I look back into the mirror today, my face, bedded with streaks from years of tears, I cannot help but wonder if I was always meant to become like the river, holding onto heavy things, and letting go of all that is light. Easy. The place I once lived in with my aunt, a place where I would be left alone with my grandparents when she left to study, would become dust to me.
I began writing this, as a means to say hello. Hello, Reader. I write this piece to make peace with the many versions of my past self. I wonder how my grandmother’s radio is doing. Songs are always permeating her soul. I think of my friends and how each and every vessel in my life beats for them. I think of the love I have for them and it drives me to push from my brain, the words I need to write this. Pushing from the depths of the void, unto my hands, onto the pen, the pressure applying as I scribble word after word, and afterwords, digitizing it into a perpetual foreverness.
The moon will start taking shape in a couple of days. In almost two weeks on the month of my birthday, she will be full again. The sun will rise with me tomorrow. I wish for it to be a good day.
Test… One, Two. Can you hear me, reader? This is how I remember.
Test… One, Two is a short story, collated from a set of broken memories, picked up from the floors of my childhood home.
Tune in next week.
Incredible read, heart strings have been pulled!