Tag: jumbled thoughts from the past few days

I am home alone, adding dollops of butter to a pot of Basmati rice. Some housewife chord has been struck in me during the fits of sleep, along with a bout of sickness.

(here, “sickness” is defined as a state of mind caused by one-quarter stomach upset and three-quarters loneliness.)

Rice pudding calls for one cup of cooked rice, milk and sugar. I turn the knobs of our gas stove in one of my mother’s cross-stitch sweaters. It’s older than I am, a relic belonging to the age of my mother’s young adulthood. The last time it was worn, she was an unmarried Londoner, bopping around in pastel work pants and dark shades. Now, I am the daughter who has taken it from the wardrobe, but I have neither spunk nor savvy, not today.

Samsara, “continuous flow”, the cycle of birth, life, death and rebirth. Then, can be it assumed I am a body travelling a circular path at a constant speed? This is a principle of uniform circular motion, something I was taught last year in sophomore physics. I can still remember my polyester uniform skirt sticking to the backs of my knees, sweat like cake batter, and my breath a tangible print in the air. Question four: calculate the velocity of an object travelling in a circle.

(here and in the realm of physics, “speed” refers to how fast an object is moving, whereas “velocity” is the rate at which it changes position.)

Samsara, a cycle in which I am the body stapled, marked and labelled, drawn as a dot in religious textbooks. But though speed is constant in a circular environment, I can change the velocity. I can accelerate or de-accelerate if that is my wish, though I am bound by egoism and futile desire.

A six square meter kitchen with a small balcony where clothes dry and detergent is kept. The oyster-colored tiles and cabinets of poor-quality wood, the porcelain bowls of green apples slowly ripening, and I, sitting at a dirty table eating salted crackers because my rice pudding has the taste and texture of charcoal.

I am reading “Madame Bovary.” Doleful and desperate Emma makes me smile, but I only ever want to be her twin in name. And on the days when I feel myself leaning towards her awful habits, I pretend my name is not “Emma” but “Ema”, and this small change seems significant because –

(here and everywhere, “Ema” are the small wooden plaques on which Shinto worshipers write their wishes, prayers, vows or expressions of thanks. Ema is hung up in shrines, where it reaches the gods.)

A strange thing has been happening with my lips lately. They are swollen and split, segmented into thin cellular clumps like slices of bruised apples. I am dedicating myself, still, to my miserable novel, as well as other elements of quotidian life. Not everything I have been doing has been going beautifully. But when I ask my mother to print a photograph for me at her workplace, she brings home various sizes and angles of the same picture, black and white, vivid hues, subdued tones, in a spring green folder left on my desk: this is the sort of thing that motivates me to move on, to keep grabbing and ripping and yanking at the serpentine vines of my own personal jungle. Oh, please forgive my childish metaphors: these are the only sorts of things that make sense to me, now, nowadays.

This summer, when I wrote my short story, I was extremely enamored of a certain phrase: “to seek, to strive, to find and not to yield.” A line from Tennyson’s “Ulysses” and inscribed on the cairn of snow that marks RF Scott’s place of death. I think of Platyhelminthes, simple, dumb, uncomplicated flat worms composed of a one-two-three body structure and no heart nor lungs. Platyhelminthes, who, when cut in thirds, will regrow the parts they are missing, effectively becoming three organisms from one. Regenerating their heads, those stupid beasts, doing everything I cannot!

The other day on the radio I heard the song “Fire With Fire” by Scissor Sisters. I’d never heard it before, but it melded in with my state of mind and the landscape wonderfully. The twists and gurgles of far-away mountains, slate blue, shady but always new to my infant eyes. Fight fire with fire, fire with fire, fire with fire. Yes. Though not everything I have been doing has been going beautifully, I have weapons at my disposal, sheer gut and gumption, fiendish blaze curdling in my own metalworker’s stomach. I have reasons and mechanisms to ignite. Fire with fire.