By Mydhili R Varma
I wake up to the frustratingly cheerful chirping and calling of birds. I despise them with all my passion for waking me up to the life I can no longer face. For reminding me every day morning of the things out there that I can no longer enjoy like the rest of the people can. Feeling that crunch of bare feet on dried fallen leaves... splashing the rain water puddles... reaching out and snuggling up to him, eyes closed, challenging the morning to pry us apart...
And sex. Not the mind-blowing, blow-the-top-of-your-head-away sex. Sex that makes living easier. Something other than the pain to convince you that you're still alive. That untouchable personal beatitude.
Back then, before my world fell apart in a million pieces, I could shut out the world while I wrapped my arms around him. He was every bit my whole world. Now I shut out the world hoping for a few more minutes of thoughtless, painless emptiness. Emptiness that has taken over my life. Emptiness that has become my life.
Staring at the ceiling, I imagine all the things I didn't get to do just because I was a prissy idiot. I didn't even experience the five stages of grief, for God's sake! Up until recently, I was in a coma. Five months and nine days. It took me five months and nine days after the accident to come back to my senses and deal with the five-month-old trauma. Overcoming it now feels impossibly unnatural. During the time I lost to the coma, everyone got ahead of me in the grieving process. My friends, his friends, family. When I woke up there wasn't any of that hot coal feeling of devastation in anyone. Other than the lingering trail of sadness, they had found their stable ground.
I am told repeatedly that I am lucky to be alive and out of the coma. Lucky. I remember tossing the word in my head the first time I heard it and trying to make sense of it. Lucky. Lost the love of my life. Lucky. Lost the use of my legs. Lucky.
It is all so twisted and damaged that I can only laugh at myself. I am so lucky that I am even denied the right way to grieve over my losses.
Physically I feel like a big void. A nothing-bag of nothing in a whole world of nothingness. I don't remember how or when exactly the numbness began. It came silently, unsuspectingly creeping upon me, crawling haphazardly along my calves, settling on my knees to take a look around, then up my thighs ominously before it came all the way up to my heart, stopped to take a breath, curled up comfortably and went to sleep.
This sort of numbness cannot be woken up from. When it settles down, it settles down for good. Like a one-woman man. Trust me, I have tried.
I do not wail. I am that piano that was pushed over the staircase and landed upside down with the keys all strewn over. Someone must've gathered the keys in handfuls and fixed them in the empty spaces randomly.
White in place of black and black in place of white.
I feel like if I speak it will not sound right like the piano with the wrong keys in the wrong places.
I am useless like the damaged piano and I should not make a sound lest I make people uncomfortable. I sense how everyone feels the need to reassure me how bad they feel for me. I don't trust sympathy. It comes from the wrong place and pretends to be the wrong thing. If anyone loved me they wouldn't sit and give me that sorry look. They would grab something and throw it at the wall on my behalf. They would know it's the right thing to do because I can't do it myself - the nearest vase is too far off to reach on my own.
I remember our last day together despite the blackout from the coma. I remember it like I have travelled back in time and am still in that car with him. Us driving back home from the movie, him singing along with the song on the radio, me telling him his pitch is off like it always is, his usual comeback that I am a pitch snob. The accompanying grin. I remember it like an embossed metal painting as if someone spiteful decided to etch every inch of his grinning face into my broken heart. The light shower, the nip in the air, his grinning face, everything comes rushing into memory without as much as a warning, not that I want to forget. That would be even more horrible. But then, I don't know what's worse - forgetting or remembering. All I know is that I am a wreck. A damn wreck.
I don't want it to be this way but then I suspect nobody confined to bed wants it that way.
It’s too much to process and I turn my head away, willing myself back into sleep. All I need is to not remember. A complete mindswipe, if you will.
I manage to bring myself to the cliff’s end of sleep when a strange, low humming reaches my ears. I imagine I must be dreaming and wait for the visuals. Nothing. The humming continues until I conclude that it cannot be a dream and open my eyes to a strange sight: an unfamiliar woman in her thirties sitting in my grandfather’s high-backed chair, looking out the window and humming.
I reach for my glasses on the bedside table and accidentally knock down the alarm clock.
The woman turns and claps her hands. ‘Oh, you’re awake!’
When I push my glasses up my nose and face her again, I can’t believe the sight before my eyes. My face, my clothes, my hair, but on someone other than me!
‘Well, hello, you!’ Even her voice is mine.
‘It’s just a hallucination,’ I assure myself in a gravelly voice hoarse from months of dormancy.
‘Hell no, I’m not,’ counters my clone, looking offended.
My extremities turn cold and a bead of perspiration runs down my face, tickling my cheek. Just when I think of calling out to the home nurse, she comes in unannounced with my toothbrush in one hand, breakfast in the other and a bedpan pressed into her armpit. I suppose unless you are bedridden you don't quite understand the beauty of being brought these completely separate things separately, although they come consecutively in their usage.
Her presence calms me down a bit but what is disturbing is that she doesn’t even acknowledge the presence of the strange woman in my room. I ask probing questions about whether I have visitors or mails. She answers in the negative combined with a surprised expression at hearing me speak for the first time.
The stranger, my lookalike, smiles at my efforts at confirming her existence and shakes her head.
When I am done and the nurse is gone - where does she disappear to during the intervals, I wonder – I am left panting from all the effort and the pain. It takes a while for the painkillers to kick in and numb the pain in my legs. Any sort of movement triggers unbearable pain and mornings are the worst.
‘Still don’t believe I’m here?’ mocks my lookalike, getting up and walking towards me. ‘Let’s do away with the questions, shall we? Uh, that’s another question. Anyway, you might have figured out who I am by now. I’m here-’
‘Sorry, no,’ I interrupt. ‘The best explanation I have is that I probably need a psychologist more urgently than a physiotherapist.’
She laughs. I look at her graceful stance, something that had once been mine. I am shamelessly envious of her movement and I can’t stop staring at her legs moving towards me. I am euphoric to see her walk and reflexively move my own limp leg. A blast of pain shoots through my leg towards my pelvis and I gasp and look away from her to hide my hot tears.
‘I am The Muse,’ she says in a ta-da tone and goes silent, as if waiting for my response, as if it means something to me. When I don’t respond quickly enough, she continues, ‘You are my googolplexianth case. You’re truly special.’
‘Why do you look like me?’ I blurt out.
‘Who else do you think your muse should look like? Beyonce? That’s ridiculous.’
‘What do you want from me?’
‘It’s not what I want, sweetie. It’s what you want. I’m here to help you reach where you’re meant to reach.’
‘And where exactly is that? Top of the Himalayas? Look at me! I can’t even turn over on my own! Where would you take me in this condition?’
‘Back to the novel you didn’t bother to complete.’
The twinkle in her eyes and the hopefulness in her voice are hard to miss but I am unstirred. Everything that I once held close to my heart has lost its charm and nothing seems worth pursuing anymore.
‘I am done chasing stories and plots and ticking things off the bucket list. My bucket’s empty.’
‘You’re making this tough for me. You see, next person in my list needs me as much as you do, so I can’t stay here for eternity while you brood and complain and make silly excuses!’
I shrug and look away.
‘Right. The silent treatment. I knew this was going to be a tough case.’ She crosses her legs and propping her face on her fist, looks out the window.
The Muse, I contemplate. Since when did The Muse start giving house visits in full body disguise?
We endure the rest of the day this way, with her debating for completion of my novel and me ignoring her completely. By nightfall I feel sorry for her but I know I can’t help her. She’s asking for too much. The power goes off and we are left to listening to the crickets and watching the candle flame flicker.
‘That’s it,’ she says after few minutes of swatting mosquitoes in near-darkness. ‘You are going to continue writing that novel right now.’
She deposits the desk across my body, places my laptop on top of it and cocks her head towards it. ‘Write.’
‘I don’t-’
She puts her forefingers in her ears and interrupts, ‘Don’t care what you write. Just write! Write or I will start shouting. How about a tug at that leg? Would you like that?’ I gasp at her suggestion. The pain would kill me. ‘I won’t if you write, though.’
Defeated by what could very well be a figment of my imagination – unless the nurse has really bad eyesight – I open the word document with the working title ‘My Novel’ and start reading from where I had left off.
My fingers linger over the keys for a few seconds and then somehow I know what to write next. Like connecting the dotted lines to form a complete picture, words emerge from nowhere and form meaningful sentences. I begin to tap at the keys urgently like my life depends on it, my fingers trying to keep up with me.
Within moments, I shed my half-dead body and slip into those of the characters. I realise triumphantly that no accident can stop me from living the hundreds of lives I can build using words on paper. This swapping of lives, albeit imaginary, seems like the perfect adjustment for someone in my predicament.
And who knows, maybe I still stand a chance at being whole again.
By Mydhili R Varma