By Durdaneh Malik
Dear Chandramallika,
I saw you reflected on the speeding windows of the subway train—a hologram, glitching and at once, also remaining a continuous outline when the light pouring between the cracks allowed it. I see you without being there—you’re crossing the street like any other pedestrian finding their way back to a place of residence after the day’s end, as a force of habit. You’re walking now, the remnants of gravel crunching underneath your footsteps—a sound I found so intensely fascinating when I was about five years old and had just learned to walk hand in hand with someone who abandoned me.
No one in my life knows you exist, and they all know what you look like. I am watching you walk with bated breath, knowing that this time, too, you will walk right past me, unaware, whistling some tune you would only remember when the mundane becomes an inconvenience. Or rather, you would pass through me entirely, like the ghost of someone I got tired of burying over and over again.
People are starting to ask questions now. Isn’t this what happens to the shriveling bodies of beached whales, when atrophy sets in and the salt spills over from the flesh of it? Like a pile of soiled laundry, I hastily gather you and close the storage-locker door, clumsy and loud, upon the arrival of these unintended guests. I say, “Not now.” “I need time/I don’t understand/It was just an odd time in my life/I don’t talk about that.”
No one in my life knows you exist. I think about that a lot. Especially when I sit alone at a desk surrounded by strangers, exhausted, with my head resting in the cradle of my arms.
I remember that upon the convergence of this path that first time, you asked me to barter something in return for you. I was going to run away with her. I was going to live with her like I planned to. I had just finished sharpening the weapon and galvanizing on it a pattern I saw on a teapot at the pawn shop. I was going to adorn her hand with it, a few years shy of our 40th anniversary, so she could position it where it was anatomically correct and with mercy and utmost finesse—execute me.
But then I turned the weapon on you. I must have known. It had to have been privy to me, if I lunged at you with force —enough to make the red in your eyes bloom and block your tear-glands. I remember the pleading in those eyes of yours. I wonder, after all these years, was some of that for me? Did you, for some mysterious sting that may have momentarily taken birth in your conscience, implore me to run back then?
This letter makes no sense. None of the ones I wrote you do. Nor do the poems. They are so beautiful, still. They are footage—like those kitschy video tapes you find in your parents’ basement of them getting married. It is within writing that made no sense where I lifted the veil from your face, beloved. A red veil, like those worn with timidity and pride by the women of my country—each thread of that fabric was a vessel of mine, holding blood that pulsed and spilled for you. A boy with a woman’s face: my bride. I have never described your hands as anything other than flowers—fickle things, with their flippant beauty. They still nag me from high atop their branches—holy, out of reach. Like russet, plump pomegranates swaying in the sun, I wonder if love becomes chewable between one’s teeth. Something that ripens, darkens into that obscene ruby red color and congeals like blood and brain matter mixed all into one mouthful. And it still won’t be enough to satisfy any of this, would it?
The purpose of this document is to tell you how I feel. In the utter muck of emotions you hoarded within me, I struggle to discern which one I should pick this time. The needle weaving all of them together has always, always been grief. Even now, as I grieve (yet) another, are you not still swimming inside of it? Squirming, turning like a worm out during a thunderstorm, mending soil for the garden?
You are my tower. The structure from where the love outsources to its distributaries. You are the shape and exact dimensions of the dream I left tucked into my childhood home, at the last threshold of innocence, where the world still felt bendable. And now the aftermath—every time my heart begins to race again when I accidentally catch the color in someone’s eyes, I see you reflected back to me. I do not wince anymore. Not once. It is simply routine. It is Gospel; it is a law which cannot be deflected from.
I desire another—I desire you.
I find another—I find you.
No one and everyone in my life knows that you exist. And that is something I will just have to learn to live with.
I desire another—I desire you.
I find another—I find you.
I call for someone, and it is you who answers.
You answer and you hum and you dillydally your way into the same house you’ve been walking into every single day for just under a decade now. Your walk has ended. You’re finally home.
You sink into rest; I open my eyes.
The world keeps turning—so heavy and giant, the weight of a whole planet. Yet so perplexing how it just…floats there in an infinite expanse—weightless, and without dignity.
I think of this. I think of it a lot.
Time to cross the street.
There are no bridges.
I hope you know that. And against all possible bounds of rationality, I hope that it kills you someday. I hope you yearn to get the favor returned, wallowing in the guilt of how you turned on the hands that washed your feet with a devotion almost unfairly Biblical.
There are no bridges between people like you and people like me.
With that, I sign this off.
Sincerely,
M.
Durdaneh Malik is a graduate student pursuing a PhD in biology and currently resides in upstate New York in the U.S. She loves locking in to bass-heavy darksynth music, because it’s honestly hilarious to imagine finding oneself in the middle of a club, studying. When she isn’t at the center of a fresh bout of unravelling, she can actually be pretty decent company.