oranges

september came without warning, really, and i had to do squats every evening of august to be able to stem the month to come. no one tells you it’s all in your head.

i think it is saturday today. the dust always settles on saturdays as if allowing itself that one day of rest before swindling away again on monday. i think of the oranges lying in the carefully threaded basket on the kitchen counter. the door of my bedroom is closed and i know if i would just open the window then the curtains would start breathing again, gulping and collapsing like lungs brought back to life and light and love and all that crap.

my mother died exactly two weeks ago and my father still sits in the back yard, day and night, listening to his singular breathing. he’s counting the breaths that would have normally been doubled. i suppose there is too much air for him in the backyard now. the house was used to producing air for two as much as the world was.

no one tells you love is all in your head.

the plaster folds and crumbles on my bedroom wall, just above my head on the right, where i talked to god as a child that could not help but believe, every day, even in september and the months that came with it. god was on the right side above my head and my dreams on the left, hung up like clean, white linen sheets.

it is saturday so tomorrow it is sunday so maybe i will let myself inhale for the first time in two weeks, despite the air belonging to her originally, and i will not feel guilty about it and i will pick up my life and old habits, like hanging up white bones on white walls or smiling. there is a shrine for all the times i loved and it is bone-white now in the same way it was linen-white with eleven years and bigger dreams. no one tells you it is all in your head.

the yellow cut-out stars that stick to the ceiling, like memoirs of birds carefully picking their children’s home, stopped shining somewhere between seventeen and moving out, but if you bear the thicker kind of darkness long enough you’ll see the attempt of sculpting the big wagon and stomping it into white like me and my mother used to stomp a heartbeat into the mountains over summer vacation. i miss the birds sometimes now. no one tells you they wait just behind the coma-induced curtains.

my mother was the kind of mother that let you draw the big wagon to your ceiling despite it actually not even being a real star sign. i avoid searching for the big bear now. you learn stuff like this when the right side above your head begins to look like sex and red wine and the left like hung up bones against white walls.

she made pumpkin soup and carrot cake and peeled oranges for the people around her so that they would consume as much of the colour orange as possible.

she called me by my name until i loved being me and she preferred small forks over big ones. she knew how to make people great and remaining great herself. she forgot to teach me.

she smelled best of all the mothers of my friends but she forgot to tell me that there were words like ‘temple’ that sounded beautiful and meant beautiful things and that most beautiful things were soft things and that on the other hand, there were words like ‘longing’ that sounded beautiful but were not soft at all.

it is every night just before finally falling asleep that i can hear the bones fall and crack and splinter and howl on my carpeted childhood bedroom floor. no one tells you how even carpet can feel like splinters if you let your skin go soft for too long. no one tells you how clawingly difficult it is to remain soft toward words like ‘longing’. no one tells you how much harder it is to let yourself grieve than not to.

the house grew normal-sized in the past two weeks. the fortress is gone and the house grieves, i fear, heavier than me. it is so still that i cannot do much else than lie with it, like lead creeping over every single object but me. i feel the house needing me but the grief rejects. the naked desk-lamp freezes on my nightstand and i can only watch. my father took out the batteries from the old mahogany clock in the living room two days after her death.

the sound drives me insane, he said.

i haven’t left my room in two weeks but i long for the indication of time -and thus life- like a drowning man for water. i cannot tell him and i cannot get up and i cannot ask the curtains to move and i cannot see a bird that will naturally assure me the world is, in fact, still spinning.

in the morning i hear my father collecting his heart that lies scattered on the living room floor and i hear him going to bed when the night creeps away because the daylight is too harsh. i get it. it has a very cruel way of exposing everything one doesn't want to know about. there is a mock in the way my father's body still forces him to go to sleep, despite his reluctance, like it failed to read the room and cheerfully chanted out reminders of his life still rattling on flawlessly, naturally. if death is so close to you that you begin needing it to breathe, wanting it to never leave again, you learn to hate life. you start opposing life like you had once opposed death. it takes some time until you realize that you're better off without either coming too close.

i hear the fridge mock the bees with its buzz and the tab drawing honey and the yawn of the boiler. i think for a moment that i can do this too; work despite tiredness. i hear the gutter drink from the sky when it rains, gulping down the cure to emptiness. the walls watch the empty kitchen table at day and soothe the itching, wailing, creaking floorboards at night. they need a scrub like our old australian shepherd dog needed one, and i find myself envying him now, for having died before her.

my chest has been stuffed with wasps and my stomach fed with grief to the point of sickness. i had so often begged life to stuff me to the brim with love, to be so full with it that I got nauseous with it; so i could finally let it be. it had granted me that wish, just that now the love was wearing grief like a camouflage coat hiding from the enemy -whom i didn’t know, and thus couldn't fight. just that i was full this time but couldn’t let it go now.

one has to tread very carefully when asking begging wailing pleading for change. life has its ways.

sometime between thinking and breathing and vomiting air it has turned sunday, and then monday, and the dust picks up its duty again and your father remains determined to let his feet turn to stumps in the backyard, let my mother take a part of him, earthing his love into the broken asphalt before the lawn. and then it turns thursday and friday and the dust rests and still you lie in your childhood bedroom dreaming of linen sheets and carefully threaded baskets that grow old with abandoned kitchen counters. and monday comes and the dust lifts and you feel your body has almost gone cold now.

even the bees have grown though thick, sluggish with exertion and you move your right pinky finger.

there comes a point you realize it’s all in your head, and then you will be so relieved you will want to cry. because if it’s all in your head, then it is all still in your head. and it won’t go so soon. and that is love and life and grief and everything bottled in your precious, precious head.

grief is something that crashes over you so forcefully that you can’t do much else but drown in it a little, and once you drown a little in it, for the first time in your life, you will grasp the full extent to what it means to be human.

i peel myself an orange today and if i’m really brave, i will spell out words like 'longing' and watch the curtains bow at them.

i will try to paint my stomach orange now, the grief bursting at the seams. i don’t want to ever get sick of it but i will let it warm me from the inside.