03: it’s only music
bickering in the backseat, the un-exceptionality of being an adult, and white white nights
tangelos on the console
We are going to pick up Malyshka in my roommate’s car. She’s stranded and on the phone declaring her undying love for the both of us, promising kisses when she’s back safe from her impulsive trip for perfume that left her with no way back home.
We are almost at the sign when she calls back asking us where we are. I tell her and she says not to bother coming, explaining that she’s on her knees in gratitude for our magnanimity but that she has found a ride.
We decide to go on a drive anyway.
Joy asks me something about composition. Something about diagonal lines and the corners of the three-by-three grid and where to place two objects in her current painting. I think a bit before replying that I don’t see how one object would work with the other in the scenario that she has painted. She says, perhaps, it would be better if I can see it. I inform her that I can see it in my head (she can’t¹) because I have seen it before. She makes a naughty face.
And that’s how we end up in a ditch.
Kind of. It’s also partly because Joy thought overgrown grass in the street gutter meant it had become a surface continuous enough for a wheel to go over. Anyway, we’re stuck in a ditch.
We bound out of the car and she says we’ll have to push. I don’t see what she sees but I don’t dissent. She tries to push and I watch. She strains once against the black body of the car before concluding that we may have to call a friend. For what though, she wonders aloud.
For more hands, I reply.
A light bulb tinkles on in her head and she opens YouTube. The first video, in another language, saves us. She gets back into the car while I stay outside. To see! I disclaim when she suggests that I’m doing it for selfish reasons. I start making a video. Joy can’t believe her eyes.
You’re making a video?
Yes, I reply and turn off the camera when I’m satisfied. Then, she asks me to make a video because she’s ready to move now and what if it works!
I remind her that this is a serious thing and videos should not be made, as she earlier suggested.
It works and there’s no video. I regret it. Joy can’t believe it.
On our way back, lightning strikes and I ask Joy if she saw it. She says she did not hear thunder. I tell her that my lightning did not have thunder. She replies incredulously that, of course, all lightning has thunder but somehow my lightning does not have thunder. She informs me that all thunder may not sound but all lightning has its own. I don’t want to consider it so I ask her who the hell decided there was thunder when they couldn’t even hear shit. We talk over each other until I let out a sharp breath and look pointedly out the window. A minute doesn’t pass before we start cackling. It is one of those nights when we find it way too easy to descend into bickering like two under-ten siblings. In the midst of our nonsense, we pass true siblings.
A friend and his sister. I look at Joy who stops while I stick my head out the window to throw my friend’s name into the air. They appear in what seems like seconds and we’re on our way again. Sister offers us a tangelo and Brother comments that she has almost finished all the ones they bought. Sister asks if he means she’s a glutton. He says no and naturally that descends into another round of sibling bickering that I find even more entertaining.
Eventually, there are two tangelos sitting in the center console between Joy and I because according to the brother, in our culture, you don’t offer someone something in an odd number.
I remember my lightning and ask my friend if he saw it. He didn’t. Of course, you didn’t, I comment. I am suggesting that his poor eyesight could have been responsible for that. He turns into a siren of mock humiliation at my comment before turning to ask his sister who says she didn’t see it either. And Joy says of course she didn’t see it. Adding under her breath that it’s because it wasn’t there! Sister thinks Joy means that her poor eyesight is responsible for that.
And that’s how, somehow, suddenly, there are four siblings in a car arguing about four different things that only each person is aware of, while thinking it’s just lightning.
the un-ex-cep-tion-a-li-ty of being an adult
I remember being young and special. After I stopped being a baby; when everyone must have cooed when I clapped and clapped when I cooed. I was special even after that. I remember being special because I was young. It’s a bit blurry because I remember losing my socks and I also remember never losing my socks. I suppose there was time after time but for me, there’s only ever time. So, I can’t entirely separate what I remember, or know, by occasion.
I remember a before—before my new special: coming 4th in class once and eating ice cream. I also remember crying but I think I was doing that because I thought everyone expected me to. I know there were people around but I don’t know what people were around. I also remember that there was blue but I don’t know what was. The ice-cream or the sky or my uniform or my mother.
I was the kid they kept on the stage on prize-giving days because they didn’t want to have to keep calling me back on my way to my seat. That was enough to be special then. It was also important that I was young. Yes, that’s important, you also have to be special (in whichever way is your way) for your age. Because then you aren’t just special. You’re something else, you’re a miracle.
I remember my little sister being born. Five days after I turned ten, I don’t see it in my head anymore, it’s another fading film that I remember remembering. I was in awe looking at that tiny pink bundle sleeping in a cot. I knew I was going to love her forever.
I remember remembering how my brother and I would sing french rhymes to her. It was very specifically French. And I remember Pére Machico and I don’t remember when she first sang it with us but if I was anything like I am, I must have damn near cried. Because each time she breathes now, even though she’s eleven, I still think it: isn’t she a miracle?
Often, I say it. I don’t know if she believes it but I wonder if when she grows up like me, like us, when she’s no longer sitting for the first time, or walking for the first time, or doing arithmetics for the first time, she will be certain that she is no longer special. When we grow up, people stop being interested, because all we do are the things we are supposed to do. We have to be very very special to be special as adults. This is why it must be enough that we are special to our own people.
We divide the old so cleanly from the young like they don’t just have some years behind us in bigger bodies. The claps seize abruptly. Everything we do, we are obliged to do. You are no longer exceptional, you’re just an adult now. You’re actually supposed to do things.
You’re supposed to breathe (properly) and cook and eat and brush your teeth. You’re supposed to get enough sleep but also not get enough sleep because you’re supposed to be building. And you’re supposed to be getting therapy or not getting therapy but healing anyway. You should be searching for peace and learning to relax all the muscles in your body one by one. You’re supposed to take care of yourself and your friends and your family and yourself again because suddenly you are like twenty different people you know nothing about but are trying to feed and keep at peace with one another inside one body.
You’re supposed to work and not complain, if you do, only minimally because you should first be grateful that you can earn your keep at all. You must find a balance between hunger and gratitude. And you should spend but wisely and save but don’t scrounge when you don’t have to. You’re supposed to express yourself but not too much or to the wrong people. And you’re supposed to make friends and keep friends and make lovers and keep them and actually talk to all of them. You’re supposed to contribute your quota to things and you’re supposed to forgive everything and forget nothing because you’re supposed to spend the rest of your life learning lessons.
You’re supposed to be better than everything that hurt, you’re supposed to realize why they hurt. You shouldn’t turn into your father or your mother or your grandmother or, God forbid, your grandfather. You’re supposed to be all their best parts and all your best parts. And you have to learn to stop feeling a pang when you are within a 5-meter radius of a well-adjusted family.
You’re not supposed to forget that people are dead. You can’t go around asking about people who are already dead. You should learn how to grieve living things. You should learn that sometimes, there’s no one to blame. And for this, you need to have a good , firm bed so you don’t wake up tired and blame yourself. You must always wake up early and have a routine and stick to it or your life may scatter like ashes on water.
You’re supposed to know what you want to be so that you can start being it. You can’t just cruise and coast and wait for your purpose to find you. Unfortunately, you can also no longer crawl under tables unless you really have to because then you’re acting like a child.
You must learn to stop hiding under blankets when everything goes wrong. Because everything never goes wrong, things are just really good at making themselves look that way. You are supposed to believe that.
You must keep your body fed and fit. You should not overstrain your knees or ruin your teeth. You shouldn’t talk about pouring boiling water over your uterus even though your uterus already feels like it has boiling water being poured over it. You must eat your fruits and heat your food. You must go to school or work or anywhere else because you must feed your brain too. And in the blood lab, you must hold the test tube well so the blood doesn’t pour on your books. And you mustn’t shake so hard because that capillary tube is so delica- oh my God!
Look what you’ve done.
And sometimes, when it gets difficult, when adulthood slams you in the chest like a bodybuilder flung with the force of a tornado, you mustn’t want to go back to being a baby. You mustn’t want anyone to clap when you coo and coo when you clap and look to the person beside them and whisper, when you breathe deep and strong: isn’t she a miracle?
little mystery box
The title of this letter is from a poem I’ve read, recited and randomly whispered lines to myself several times a day this month. I’ve tried to find who wrote it but haven’t been able to. I only found an image of it that must have been shared on Twitter and which I saved on my phone. It’s called Joy and naturally, my roommate has suffered hearing—an unnatural number of times each day—the lines: don’t cry, it’s only music, no one you love is dying.
I have been watching TedEd’s playlist There’s A Poem for That and I have particularly enjoyed Safia Elhillo’s To Make Use of Water. Both the poem and the illustration of it.
I think I’m in love with Olivia Dean. Slowly was my first favorite but I listen to songs from her album The Art of Loving almost everyday now. Listen, you might enjoy it.
Finally, I finished The Secret History and I think I’m in some kind of disbelief. This doesn’t make much sense because what would happen had already happened from the beginning.
But there’s something about the story that is so mind-bending, something I have failed to fully grasp.² After it, I (finally) picked another book off my shelf. A book that has been there for months and whose owner has asked me to read exactly one story in it but I kept waiting for the “oomph”.
I had no idea what the story was about before I started, I only knew that I was supposed to enjoy it. It felt like serendipity when I found a major part of it central to a question of my life I’d only just come upon a few days before. It cemented to me that if I felt that I should wait for a book, I must never rush myself in rebellion. I will read it exactly when I need to.
So, I loved White Nights. The prose was—and this feels like the most appropriate word—delicious. It was like cool water when I was parched. I was very happy to have read it. I didn’t exactly see myself in any of the few characters but the theme I could relate to and I was just happy to be there and eavesdropping on their ordinary yet dramatic lives.
three things about October:
I called someone baby. Not someone I am close to or even friends with. It was a classmate who called me by name as I was walking out of the laboratory one morning to catch some silence. It slipped out of my mouth, hi baby, with such ease. I’ve always found funny my, real or imagined, difficulty with the word and its variations. So, it was (still funny but( pleasant, this surprise. I felt grown, like my elder sister or one of her friends who would endear themselves to death with tenderness.
October kind of sucked. I came too close, too often, to cumulating my feelings into despair. I could almost believe that some sorrows would last forever. It felt like I was back in the Haematology Lab and, this time, blood was pouring all over my booklet and the instructor was God saying that (insert pronoun-like word) wouldn’t even look at my script because it was too messy. And there was fire everywhere and things were breaking all over the place, glass slides and tiny hearts. And nothing, not a single thing, that I could fix.
The day of the tangelos was gifted to me. I laughed so hard it hurt and my throat scratched raw. I couldn’t breathe. And it was such a horrible day, too. I had to accept ruin of a thing I thought I would keep forever and because grief is cumulative, I had to think of all that already seems lost.
How are you? How has October been? I'm sorry if it's has been difficult and I'm happy for you if you have a better story.
I have been up to my elbows in that gut-wrenching work I talked about in the last letter. It has been sacrificing (in ways of questionable wisdom) but rewarding. I have refrained from sharing any real work in this time and it has been liberating. Only these letters have made it out of my creative drafts and they’re, although enjoyable, real work to put together.
I hope November is a slice of sunlight, cool water running down our throats and a kiss on our collective foreheads.
¹ my girl has aphantasia (something I think we’re all being too normal about)
² If you have read the book and would like to talk about it, please reach out to me via email: whateverjazzsaid@gmail.com
Muah!
S.
Just dropping a ❤️
god-level writing