Home of Light

I’ve always loved the light. It’s one of the first things I said to Ben when we were looking for a house. I want a home of light. Sunlight. And now it feels like I’ll never see the sun again.

                                                        . . .   

Mozart. Notes carried on a breeze. I see them floating towards me through the open windows. The curtains flutter like heavy eyelids. My school used to have those safety locks on the bottom of the windows so you could only ever crack them open an inch. Clean air pumping into rooms saturated with nervous tension and sweat. I would always vie for a seat near the windows.

Wildflowers sway in the late summer air puppeteered by invisible strings. Fantasia in D Minor starts up next. I lay my head back down onto Ben’s lap. I look up through my fringe, squinting against the sun, glad I wore my sunscreen today. I close my eyes and let splotches of colour dance across my eyelids.

“Wanna hear something cool?” I open one eyes just a crack, to peer at Ben. He’s arching his back pointing his face towards the light. Sunflower Boy. That’s what I used to call him in college. Lamest superhero ever was his response every time.

“Shoot.”

I clear my throat, “Apparently, Mozart may have had dependent personality disorder. He would get overly distressed by his wife’s absences, had difficulty regulating emotion and wrote masterpieces.”

“Huh, I always thought he had bipolar disorder.”

“That’s exactly what psychiatrists used to think. Isn’t it really messed up that artistic genius and mental health have such an inverse relationship?”

“Correlation does not equal causation.”

“I guess. Is it messed up that I can’t decide which of the two I want for our kids?”

“Yeah, that’s definitely messed up.”

“Well, it’s definitely a shame you’re so nice. This one doesn’t stand a chance.”

Prefab Sprout. The King of Rock ’N’ Roll being churning out of the old vinyl player. When I was little, I always thought there were people in the speaker part of the turntable grunting against a crank like on one of those tiny music boxes. It seemed ridiculous that you could get something so beautiful for nothing. With minimal effort.

Chopping onions and chewing gum. And wriggling around to the beat, singing under my breath my tongue working around the gum to shape the words. I scrape the chopped mess of veggies into a pan as the chorus starts. Abandoning all half-hearted attempts, we just dance. It’s infectious, a real ohrwurm. Bare feet sliding over the floorboards. The pan sizzling in the corner. All the lights are on. And we just dance.

Neil Young. The only man who can get a harmonica to tug on my heartstrings. Pure gold. Honey on my tongue. His tinny voice drifting in the background. He always seems to be singing to himself anyway.

“Knight to D3!”

“Oh, I’m so sorry I forgot we were playing wizard chess, Ben.”

“A superior form of gameplay…What are you doing?! What even is that?”

“I thought you nerds had a name for every kind of opening.”

“Firstly, we are connoisseurs. And secondly, we don’t have names for openings that make no sense.”

“Sense is something we assign.” 

“Nietzsche, is that you?”

“Was it the accent or the moustache that gave me away?”

“The widow’s peak actually.” 

“Them’s fightin’ words! You know I have no control over this!”

“Control is something we assign.”

“That makes no sense.”

A pointed look from Ben.

“Loud and clear, captain.” A three-fingered salute from me.

I lose.

Cigarettes After Sex. Big morning stretch. Starfish style. Ben’s face appears, hovering over mine. Puffy eyes, silly smile, and a nose whose slant betrays which side of the bed he sleeps on. I flounder like a fish out of water trying to get up until he offers me his arm, laughing. Brushing our teeth, desperate attempts at comedy ensue. Today’s antics include terrible impressions of my aunt Carol, John Oliver presenting our breakfast options and a first-time stand-up comedy gig comprising entirely of puns. Heavenly.

I win, six to four.

Mitski. The sound of rain. War drums overhead. Overcast. Overcome. The worst blackout of that year; extra candles dug out of boxes in the attic, an olfactory cacophony of vanilla, bonfires and whatever ‘midnight desire’ is supposed to smell like. Feeding the fire with old newspapers. Here comes the airplane! Ben ventures out into the blackness, swallowed with a satisfied smack as the doors swing shut behind him. I feel so very medieval wrapped in furs, poking and prodding at shrivelled words on parchment skin glowing in the embers of a dying star awaiting the return of my husband who has conquered the wilderness to bring back already chopped wood that we’d forgotten in the back of the car. We build a fort. None of that ‘four chairs and a sheet’ rubbish. We commit. I remember watching Matilda as a child and knowing that a family that moves furniture together stays together. Ben refuses my help as he shoves the couches closer, but I pull my weight and bring the blankets and pillows from our bedroom, tottering down the stairs like a toddler just getting used to the weight of its own head. Stacked duvets and too soft pillows, getting lost in layers of scratchy wool and bumpy felt and never wanting to find my way out again.

“Tell me you love me,” I say later when we’re just holding each other watching the fire rage and listening to the rain splutter in response.

“I love you,” Ben says, no warmth or tenderness lost to the tone of my imperative.

“I love you too.”

Deep into the night, enjoying our pocket universe, I lazily run my hands up and down his arms. My fingers being swept along the rivers of blue jutting out through his skin. His hands are tracing suns and stars on the taunt skin around my bellybutton. I melt under his touch. Liquid smooth.

“Skin,” he says with the innocent enthusiasm of voyagers landing on unmanned shores.

“Skin,” I say, confirming his suspicions.

That night I dream of unmoored ships drifting off into the inky blackness, their only lights shrinking as they’re carried away, until they just blink out of existence.

Blink.

I feel wet.

Blink.

I grimace.

Blink.

I think I’m going to be sick.

Oh, God.

Blink.

My right leg twitches, jerking awkwardly this way and that. Bursts of pain coming from my abdomen. I try to sit upright but my body collapses in on itself, like a house of cards left out on a windy day. A frantic sound I think I make somewhere between a gasp and a giggle wakes Ben up. Bleary-eyed he looks across our sea of blankets to me. It takes a minute for my brain to catch up with my eyes, but I see his widen and his eyebrows move to interlock like teeth on a zipper. He has tears in his eyes as he looks back up at my face, and his mouth is moving. Gargling a silent prayer.

In the car, I can’t stop looking at the crimson splotches on my Star Wars pyjama bottoms. I remember thinking that C3PO looked ridiculously menacing covered in blood.

All the lights are on. Massive overhead ones, smaller lamp-like ones shining in my face, bedside ones all humming in unison.

Just breathe. We’re trying everything we can. You’re going to be ok. Just breathe.

How can my soul yearn for something it’s never known?

Silence. How can you be at once so familiar and so alien? Like I’ve known what it’s like to know and love you and yet I can’t picture your face? I don’t know what you look like. And then I do. You’re so small. And immaterial. You feel like one of those dolls kept together by solid plastic limbs and a soft cushiony middle. Like a slinky. Like a ferret. Disjointed and misaligned.

How can I say I am a mother when I failed before I even began? What do I know of pain of loss of grief when our first and last moment was one and the same? The moment was meant to be mute, like in the movies. Where the protagonist is being held by the one they love as they wail and cry and beat their chest and struggle to get loose. But instead of being mute, of simply seeing the wide chasm of a mouth open in despair my ears are flooded with my own destruction, yet it seems not to be mine at all. It’s cracked and bruised and beaten. It leaks out of a crack somewhere inside of me. And it makes Ben flinch.

All touch felt disgusting. I wanted to reduce the thin fabric tied around my back into nothing more than bleached confetti floating down to the linoleum floor. But I didn’t. Pieces of my dignity my poor husband was desperately trying to assemble in the corner didn’t fit together anymore. Like flat pack furniture missing all the nails and screws.

He looks up with hooded eyes that have seen too much.

“This is my fault.” My voice is cracked and raw.

Ben says nothing. He walks over to the bed. His steps land with a new and terrible solemnity, and his feet seem to be dragging behind the rest of his body. He takes one of my hands in his and it just rests limply on his palm. His head bends down in supplication as he presses his dry lips to each of my chewed fingers, warming them, before finally folding a kiss into the palm of my hand.  

“If your faith in me should fail

just say these words

and we’ll drive the world from its measured ellipse

and take it where we like,

just say these words

and starting from the trailing ends

I’ll roll up the criss-cross liquorice of the nation’s roads

to a great sticky wheel at your garden gate.”

“That’s not the right order,” I say through tears and tentative smiles.

“Order is something we assign.”

                                  …

Tamino. Crooning Habibi as throngs of onlookers sway in synchrony, mesmerised. The camera pans over a girl, lips lined in black who mouths every word as her glasses catch the flash of stage lights every time she tilts her head. This is why I love him. He looks into the gaping maw of truth and brings back something beautiful. We start dancing in the kitchen again. Well, maybe not dancing but moving, nonetheless. All the lights are on.

We name you Noor.