Life Isn't A Sickly 23kg

I wouldn’t have done it had she stayed of her own volition.

Her legs don’t quite fit, and she lies crumpled like a ragdoll, her torso in the suitcase, her limbs hanging out like the petals of a flower opening at daybreak. I learned about nyctinasty on a walk home from high school once. I’d thought flowers were forever open once bloomed. Nope, said my classmate. I was wrong.

Anyway, that’s beside the point. Gorgeous, she is, even in this state. Odd, though, to see Nora so weak. To have felt her wriggling beneath my grip like a fly buzzing wildly on a sticky trap, its wings superfluously (and pathetically) ambitious. Eyes bulbous and bulging, watching me. Two microphones demanding I speak. You’re my life, I said.

She shouldn’t have packed – I mean, she said she loved me. You don’t tell someone you love them and then abandon them. I love you but I love myself more, she said. The world’s sick, it is. Insatiable. You’ve got a man who loves you, a future, and you throw it all away in the name of freedom. You throw it all away so you can lug a hideous, blue suitcase across the world. Freedom, it doesn’t click like a broken wheel, or reek of a T-shirt worn for three consecutive days. It doesn’t mean discarding everything so that life weighs a sickly 23kg. Who fed her these illusions, and convinced her that a plane ticket was anything more than a flimsy bit of paper? More than old bricks and canvases and disenchantment? Been there, done that. If my angel (O, her rosy cheeks and wide eyes!) wants to be mugged beside an ancient fountain, am I wrong to put my foot down? Am I supposed to watch her wander into the world and be manipulated by smiling people who compliment her eyes and offer her twigs of rosemary? I love her, and love means protecting those dear to you.

And I didn’t plan it, you know. It was just a thought I had no intention of feeding. Yeast without sugar, fungi without moisture. When I bought the respirator off eBay, I didn’t think I’d actually need it. Hence the pink kitchen gloves. I peel them off my hands and drape them over her computer chair. Had I planned any of this, I’d have been better prepared. I’d have had the proper equipment. I wouldn’t have to sit here, on the edge of her bed, staring at the wardrobe and its broken knobs. She’d hidden inside, you see. A stupid hiding place. Tried tying the handles together with her scarves, I think, but they hang there uselessly like the insides of a slaughtered pig. Fear registered on her expression as I opened the wardrobe doors. Fear of me. That was aggravating. You know, after everything.

 Sorry, I’ve been zoning out. Funny, that. I rise and tuck myself into bed, beneath her Egyptian cotton sheets, 500 thread count. Birthday present from yours truly. I cuddle Xiao Yu, one of her plushies – his tail fin hangs by a thread, and his big, vacant fisheye stares through me. I open the drawer of Nora’s nightstand and fish her sewing kit from amongst the condoms (which I count just to be sure), the batteries, and loose sheets of paper.

I stare into the eye of the needle, and it stares back. I lick the frayed blue thread. Why’d Nora go and ruin everything? Stupid, she looks, hanging out that suitcase. Hair splayed like a drowning woman. She loved that word. I just feel suffocated, she’d say, like I’m drowning. Drowning, drowning, always drowning.

I love you. Drowning. I miss you. Drowning. Marry me. Drowning.

This is the first time I’ve ever hit a woman (besides my sister, but that doesn’t count). I panicked, I think, because it took longer than expected. The thrashing, the struggle, it’s never portrayed in cinema. Maybe because they’re not instructions. And she put up quite the fight, the bitch. She even held her breath when she caught a sweet whiff of it. And that was just as aggravating – her knowledgeability, her resourcefulness, and her resistance.

But Nora, her thoughts are whimsical and ungrounded. She’s a loose kite, and the winds, they aren’t kind. She needs an anchor, she needs me. I mean, she described herself as a cloud once. Lunatic, she is, when she isn’t rational and intelligent and thoughtful (because she can be all those, too). Floating above, sometimes. Floating around and “going wherever the wind takes her.” Nonsense. Beautiful, though, her delusional conviction in the airy-fairy weightlessness of being. It’s one of the reasons I fell in love with her, actually. She pulled a sword from my stone heart which I hadn’t even known was there, besides the mild throbbing somewhere in my past. It was a splinter absorbed and integrated into my being, my soul. There was nothing large enough to hurt me. Negligible. A mere thorn. Nothing large enough to hurt me until her. Fear in her eyes, God damn it. Fear of me.

Oh, my little dandelion. Lips carved so beautifully, porcelain skin. I put down Xiao Yu, put down the needle, and approach my unconscious darling, her pink lids like plum blossoms. Eyelashes so long, tips bleached blonde by the sun. Sweet, little thing, trying to abandon me. Silly, she is. She doesn’t know what she wants or that the “monster beneath her bed” lurks in the great unknown. That it isn’t safe, not for her. Not for her in her skintight jeans and flimsy tank top. I twiddle a spaghetti strap between my thumb and forefinger, pull it down over her shoulder. Bare. How easily it slipped right off, you see. And how white her skin, freckles like a sprinkling of chocolate dust over milk foam. But her poor cheek, it carries the red sting of my palm. That’ll bruise, I think. What will we tell her mother?

And no, I didn’t knock her out. It was the chloroform (eventually). I don’t know why I write this knowing I’ll be misunderstood by those who know less. Like vultures, you are, ripping me apart before knowing the entire story. Before knowing that this woman, the love of my life, decided to abandon me, herself and our future. The future we planned, was it just a girl’s fairytale written in glitter ink, meant to be lost and forgotten? Dug up again in decades, in some old notebook, the subject of a nostalgic smile, a derisive snort and head shake. Oh, sweet naïveté. Silly but sweet naïveté. But these were my life plans – the plans of a grown man with both his feet on the ground (and its mud, its moisture, its sad patches of faded green). It was real for me. And what was that sparkle in her eyes? More than a fool’s parched hallucination, it was. And oh, how her body melted into mine, as hot as candle wax, when we merged. I can’t have imagined it. If only she knew that this is life. Life isn’t a sickly 23kg.

I tie a tiny blue knot and tug at Xiao Yu’s tail. All better. Tuck him into bed. I pick up Nora’s clothes strewn around the bedroom. Ripped them from her suitcase, I did. Wrong of me, I know. I’ve always been short-tempered. I open her wardrobe, empty, bare coat-hangers like teeth in the great, yawning skull. I put her shirts back on hangers and into the wardrobe. Staying, she is. My stomach turns at the thought of her on that plane, of the gaping absence she’d have left behind – empty drawers, an empty wardrobe, empty cafés and empty afternoons, empty side of the bed, empty dining table chair, empty Sunday mornings and empty crosswords. I reel at the thought of the echo. Thank goodness she’s here, right here, breathing. Just the pulse of her heart and me. I drop a shirt, drop to my knees. Oh, I hold her limp hand in mine. Warm, it is. Bitten fingernails, I kiss them one by one like bruises. I recoil (shame!) at the bruise yet to form on her round cheek, plump like that of a child. I wouldn’t have done it had she understood. If only she’d— Stop, breathe. Clothes on coat hangers. Manageable, doable. One sleeve, two sleeves.

 I hang up a summer dress. Black, red roses. A little bow on the chest. Can’t help but shake my head imagining her wearing it with someone else. Can you blame me? I can’t forgive abandonment, and all this reeks of it. Her toiletries bag. Mini bottles of shampoo and soap. Planned. All planned. The room, half empty. Unlived in, it seems. I hang another summer dress. Into the wardrobe it goes, never to see the sun of Italy or the bustle of its cafés. Never to know its espressos or buongiorno’s or the Vespa of a bearded brunet with dark brows and olive skin. Call me jealous, but—

Oh, she groans. Respirator back on – apocalyptic, it looks. I slide back into the pink kitchen gloves and peel back the Tupperware lid. I approach my beloved, her angel eyelids, her pouted lips, and press the cloth against her nose again. Too long? Not long enough? I won’t ever do it again, I swear. Except if I do the proper research, perhaps, and take the necessary precautions. Quite cute, she is, lying there. Almost like a doll. Others have said so, too. Prettiest girlfriend I’ve ever had. Doe-eyed, freckled and inclined to blush (O God, do I love it when she does! But I could pull out my own teeth at the thought of her blushing at another man). So lovely, she is. If I could fit her into the suitcase, you could very well pop her on a shelf in the nearest toy store. If the suitcase were transparent, that is.

But why’s she in the suitcase, you might ask. It slipped my mind to explain, you see. Sometimes, I get carried away (and I might be slightly dizzy). I thought I might fold her up inside and take her home with me. Everything would be easier at home. Just a matter of efficiency, and I don’t want her neighbours to see us like this – stickybeaks, they are. Knocked on her door the day I punched the china cabinet. I still hear it – the shatter, silence, footsteps, knocking. Anyway, you might guess that Nora didn’t fit. My tiny little dandelion was too big. I couldn’t fold her into the suitcase, hence her silly limbs. I don’t know what I was thinking – sometimes she’s so small in my head, that I could fold her like a pocket square and tuck her into my coat. How old were you, by the way, when you learned that dandelions become dandelion clocks? That those beautiful yellow petals turn into fluff and float away?

Nora will thank me when she understands. I check my watch. Her flight leaves in thirty minutes. She’ll have missed it by the time she awakes again. And maybe I’ll know exactly what to say to appeal to her whimsical logic. You always have to reframe things with her, you see. She doesn’t get it. She doesn’t know what’s best or realistic or grounded. She’s a circus tent – you must drive stakes into the ground around her and tie her down or else she’ll fly away. She doesn’t know any better, though. I can’t fault her for being hopeful. Harder, still, when she’s so pretty.

Chubby, pink cheeks. Cherubic. Baby hairs frame her face. Cupid’s bow so defined, so sweet. Contoured like a deep valley. Oh, if I could flow through it like a stream! I climb back into bed with Xiao Yu. We won him at a carnival, hook-a-duck. Merry-go-round music, fairy lights, peals of laughter, Nora’s gap-toothed smile. Juvenile, almost. And now there she lies, limp and ridiculous.

I remember when she said she loved me and began to cry. She cried once, too, while we were making love. How did she go from loving so deeply to this? I feel not endearment nor pity nor regret when I look at her like this, folded up all clumsy like a sock puppet with button eyes. What I feel is disgust. Betrayal, it was, buying that ticket. Betrayal, that mini shampoo. No other name will do, no other costume or disguise. And I ache for the past – it’s not unrealistic, not a dream, not a fantasy. I ache for the past because it existed. I have had it, and I’ve known it. I know what it was like to have her staring at me starry-eyed, to have her in the palm of my hand. And I ache for it again – I ache for what it was before it was…this. As I recall her betrayal, her face warps before my eyes into that of a stranger’s, like a name repeated until it loses all meaning. I avert my eyes from the suitcase and its unfamiliar inhabitant.

I ache for that grubby, chubby, caterpillar I knew and loved. Oh, should I have pinned her emerging wings to a block of Styrofoam?