Since, A Novel

xiv. DEFEATISM

xiv.
DEFEATISM

               March 2022. Her life was yet little and she knew that. From ages thirteen to seventeen—her present age–she had felt like she had never stopped being twelve. The stepfather would yell at the wife and she would be sitting on the house's porch out in the front, twelve again. The sky is ever grey, the grass is ever withering, all leaving her wondering when would the quiet retrieve the present and seal her youth behind and stay there, and let her stay here. It was not miserable, she was not miserable, her family, however, was something beyond that. She would find herself singing the songs, the old lullabies her mother used to lull for her to sleep, the younger times when worry, to her, was as faceless as God, but it would come off as old conversations, like disembodied murmurs, feeding off of the childhood from her mouth. It was vast and leadless. She had wondered: do kids my age feel this way? And of course, she knew of her ungenerous thinking, but, like her mother, she had wanted the same grace, the same skin, the same second sight. But not the same future.

     So she would think about the only two people in her life that time, how loveless and faithless they were, how pride was the loudest in the quietest rage that they had shared, how lonely they were with each other, the unfriendliness, the unkindness they both had plastered in the preface of their boundaries and demands and thinking. Ara thought she had been living with the kind of fear that had flesh.

     2022 was the year she had turned seventeen; the year she had begun skimming through old and unabridged diaries of poets and writers and miserablists and anarchists that would often fill the dry dam she'd carried with her through all the years; it was rather horribly gratifying, concluding in a way that would leave her wanting more, questioning herself less about herself, and instead ask the dead poets, and let her imaginations answer them. It makes sense, she'd thought once in a gloomy November, it's making sense now to be made of flesh, but that did not mean she was, in any way, stopping from having a loss of face by it. She had decided that it was the worst thing she'd ever read, for having left her feeling all sorry for herself, and decided again that she wanted to be just like that.

She wanted the apology to last for long, solemn years: to be sorry for her parents, to be sorry for whatever state they'd been in, to be sorry for her mother, to be sorry for her husband, to be sorry for the people she'd had to get away because she'd known she was better off as a thought than the hurt they'd have to carry amongst themselves, which, in all likelihood, would last longer than any apologies.

She wanted to be just like that: a never-ending apology, and not feel apologetic about it, but not feel so good about it either, and pretend it was all there was to her: to be the old, unnoticed, ignored chipped mug from someone's cupboards, and like being just that. To be the flightless bird but fall onto a land of no predators, or any other like her, and like being just that. To be thankful whenever she stumbled and fell, and even be the most thankful for only meeting the ground, and thank the faceless God for falling no further. She wanted to be the kind of worst that was indifferent from any hurt and ugliness and rawness, but, this time, be significant just for one, of whom she'd always thought was herself and only herself. It felt sacred that way, she'd thought.

In the long stretch of years of only thinking about settling for less for herself, for thinking she was undeserving of anything rather than just that, she'd realised: the unnoticed, ignored chipped mug was actually someone's favourite, and it used to be someone's sip of comfort.

Because she opened her eyes.

     Next to her right was a broken lamp, slouching its head on the coaster where all the trinkets and keys and receipts sit stationary. Beside the coaster was a photo album, wrapped around it was a pink ribbon—she smiled—and a photograph peeking through its pages. She saw the chameleon plush on the floor; it must have fallen while she slept. The air conditioning stopped working, and a consolatory kind of warmth poured within the room, retreating to its normal temperature, the kind when you sleep on the last night of winter, and wake up on the first day of summer. Summer, she thought, it would be summer soon.