life cha(i)nges

The words ‘beginning’ and ‘ending’ are not as far removed from each other as one might think—examine them both under a lens for far too long, and nobody will be able to tell. Close your eyes, and suddenly, everyone can see you changing into someone else. Blink too fast, and you’ll feel a flapping of wings, of time lost and moments falling away as how dew slips off leaves, caducous in their manner. They always grow up so fast.

 

Like this: I find it curious how the phrase ‘moving in circles’ refers to being stagnant, yet on paper, growth and progression move the same way. In the cycle of life, you can’t pinpoint where it truly begins, but you try anyway.

 

Brain matter doesn’t matter when you’re a girl but not quite—perhaps the right word is yet. Here’s reality as you and I knew it back then: you came into this world with the aftermath of dawn smudged on your skin. The flush of youth, of newness. It’s a beautiful thing while it’s clean. Cherish it, the nurse says. Your mother gives that feeling a name, and it is the first burden you carry. Three years later, you view the world entering your brother’s body as it did with yours. You don’t know that no one else is coming after. You don’t know that you’re the only daughter, nor what that entails. You never know,

 

is what she says, eyes sharp like her tongue, tongue being a more humane way of saying words. I’d know because her name mirrors mine, the syllables so uncharacteristically whole of me that I’ve chosen a nickname over it: Fay is sweet and can be breathed out with ease, so I address her by that. Most of the time, she responds, and I feel like I’ve fully integrated within my blighted self. On some days, though, I can never tell. Her existence morphs and undulates with every passing season of my mind—lately, her face is the wing-pattern of a butterfly I almost recognize, but can’t, as if one of its kind had truly perched on my nose in a promise of good luck, and then broke it by fluttering away too soon. I call it bad memory because it’s true. She calls it “trying to reach for something you’ve never known.”

 

I do know this, though. I have had this conversation before, at the abandoned railroad tracks. Oddly enough, the trains never stopped. They seemed to lengthen with every interval until all was a cacophonous blur of my inner fatalities and hang-ups. I’ll never forget it—the screeching, like something being torn away from its shell. A cocoon crushed under cracked heels. She was on the other side, and so was I.  We spoke, even then, but there was no space for us in me, back then. I was too muddy, too smudged, too loud and dull at once, fingerprints all over the mirror of my mind. Why couldn’t I wipe them away?

 

Looking back, I realize that everything only appeared the way it did because I was crying. Doesn’t memory become funny when you’re unsure of the future, which is always?

 

They always grow up so fast. Stale tongue, rust forming between my teeth. Even the pine air freshener can’t save my wretched mouth now. Slam. The chain of events takes its time catching up to me, sickeningly prolonged, like slow-melting candy that’s sour at the end. Afternoon playdate. Friend’s house. Mom came to pick me up. She pulls into the parking lot of some supermarket because we’re going to buy groceries. Only she goes out—the sound of the car door having long been snuffed out by the thick air—and in.

 

I was younger at the time, and couldn’t pluck out my words quite right. I had never been good at telling apart the bitter seeds from the sweet flesh, which is why it surprised me when my mother turned to me in the kind of anger that, I think, pulls at your tongue to make yourself heard. I had embarrassed her that day, all because I ran my mouth in a brief moment of fervor. Strange, then, how my own words made me choke on them after that. Like any good daughter, I waited only until she left to plunge into my self-undoing. Start praying, even—laughable to my current, ever-questioning self—to God, some higher power, for a kind of forgiveness that existed outside of my body and my mother’s: mercy. When you’re convinced that your tongue is a sheath unfurling, who do you speak to? I cried the wrong words until they felt right, desperate, and were flailing out of my mouth in kaleidoscopic directions. Like poetry, I had never been so quick to let myself fall in the weight of tears clinging to my jaw.

 

I can’t recall what was said that day. The fainter the thrum of remembrance is, the saltier the recollection tastes on the shore of my teeth.

 

The next morning, we had a talk. She told me that I had hurt her, even if my childhood-addled brain still couldn’t fathom where my mistake lay still, sleeping in the daybreak. “Jangan ngomong kasar lagi, kak,” was what she said between breaths, eventually leaving me with a parting kiss that melted all too quickly off my forehead, but a mother’s scorn for her daughter only knows love the way a reflection is always half of itself. If the stars had heard me then, I know that what was spoken by her was what I yearned to hear.

 

Kasar. Since then, I’ve had that word written into my skin for a blink in time—my eyes are still closed—marked into the juncture of my neck by hands with teeth to remind myself that opening my mouth releases all the knives in my stomach. My parents say that I’ve always been a bit too sharp, a little too silver for my middle name, Aurelia. They still do, even if I try my hardest to create shifts within myself and rearrange my parts to be perceived as a complete being in their eyes. I keep pounding myself with a hammer, aching to hear the metal screech despite myself, clasping myself around my neck like a chain imposed on the living. How my skin sears at the base of my throat. How badly I want my voice to crack myself open, but quietly—like how the sun would, like how stars die burning and nobody mourns in their wake.

 

Here lives another toxic cycle to put in a glass case for me to laugh at with a gloved hand covering my mouth. Is it so indelicate of a thought to imagine that I wear an absent smile behind it?

 

And why is it that humans want to live again as themselves? Once, under the unflinching eyes of the moon, I thought to myself that my greatest metamorphosis would happen in death. I had already been through so much and too little in this body—I wore myself in words that followed me around, and therefore, were my shadows and the grime under my shoes. I couldn’t comprehend the desire to replicate a life once lived, to cherry-pick what can be salvaged and what to let go of a thousand times over. I held on to my pristine belief: when the same body experiences itself again, it is no longer clean.

 

I’m tired of keeping myself clean.

 

The answer is in the stain on my favorite shirt, no matter how many futile attempts I’ve had at throwing my problems in the washing machine that I call a heart and then leave them out to dry as if through evaporation, they will fully disappear. As if I won’t be drenched by monsoon out in the garden tomorrow morning—and if not, the days after. As if butterflies could fly through rain without readying a kiss beforehand, their knees due for the earth. Here’s reality as I know it now: I’m comfortable enough to self-destruct until I forget what I am capable of. Until I remember. What remains is an afterthought as sheer as smoke, rising and taking form from this spoken metamorphosis of the mind, that I am malleable, after all. Aurelia isn’t a lie dipped in the honeyed gold of truth—change is simply a constant I cannot hold myself alone to. For that purpose, I reserve the warmth of the world, but I’m learning to settle for what emanates from within.

 

The memories from before do not leave my body, but they dissipate, like dust circling around, illuminated by the sun’s hands. You didn’t know, the girl whispers, distanced with a sort of fragile equilibrium between us, but I feel the flood of her touch still. Not knowing is human. 

 

Slowly, languidly, and with purpose, the sense of heaviness seeps out of my pores. The startling ease is not lost on me—for a moment, I feel clear. For another eternity, it lasts. A word inks itself over the leftover roughness: healing.

 

And I break open.