It would not do for the world to know that the silence speaks to her. That the void is not, as is commonly thought, a void. The silence has a rough voice, rough like hands that have too often been washed in soap and water and not moisturized with the luscious hand cream from Dior. The voice that snags on the “s” portions of words, leaving a sibilant hissss. The voice that tells her secrets about people she would rather not know. Oh no, it wouldn’t do at all for the world to know her conversations with the silences.

She is tall. Taller than most men. Her breasts are pert and her legs long. Smooth. Creamy. She does leg exercises faithfully every day to ensure her legs remain lean. Her beauty maintenance includes a regime that takes two hours every day. Her nails are short, she has a habit of gnawing on them. She wears no jewelry. She can’t stand the feel of any metal on her skin. She has stretch marks on her abdomen that no cream, prescribed or otherwise, can remove. So she has decided that she is a monster underneath her favored cashmere sweaters and short no-nonsense skirts that show off her legs best. 

There was a man once. He managed to get beneath her cashmere sweater. She had turned off the lights to hide and he had stopped speaking. The silence had pooled up in the room, spilling over the edges of the night and onto the bed. It had spoken to her. “This man has three red tulips in a vase in his living room.” “This man loves you in quarters.” “This man is drawing you in his mind right now, his fingertips feel your abdomen, he feels the marks on your skin, he is adjusting his picture of you in his mind.” “This man loves sunflowers and Sunday mornings.”

The woman had been feeling like a strawberry before the silence maligned her night. She had been waiting for the man to bite into her ripe flesh. The silence had crept up her body and hissed its way into her ears. 

Now she sits, grown up and beautiful only where the clothing doesn’t cover her, in cafes frequented by noise and men. Noise that drowns the silence and men who stare at her legs.

Rain, smoke and the bitter end of a cigarette, I drip poetically all over your chair and you look at me as though you have never seen me before. Surrender, survival and submission, your existence exonerates mine. We have been one, you and I. Now we are two. It is the end of the road and somewhere, somehow, in the middle of the breaking, you became the smudged ink in a book I no longer care to read.

Freedom tastes like ash on my tongue. It tastes like blood and bone and the death of my people. It sounds like the screams that accompany my memories in the darkest corners of the night. 

I have no name. They took it away. I have no home, no country, no place to call my own, no land to leave my mark on. They destroyed it.

And I will destroy them. You may laugh since I am a woman. Weak. Exploitable and entirely forgettable. But I have a will of my own. I will set them on fire. And watch them burn. As I did. As we still do.

I reached my limit and then I dissolved like a popsicle on your tongue. It was a nice view from the floor and neon fireworks exploded in brilliant prismatic detail against the backdrop of my closed eyelids. I lay there with my limbs splayed and my body arranged for the palate of some wayward sultan. Who’s to tell and who’s to know? The walls won’t tell no matter how judgmental their pristine whiteness. It was fantastic having the strength and then losing it all in one breath.

I am at a new place. New house. New trees and a noisy road that is fast becoming my enemy - especially when I court sleep. Noise noise noise - as if the voices inside my head weren’t enough. I have been feeling like someone else lately. Someone else who is warily living the life of a girl suspended in time. Who is she and who am I and are there crossroads and what must happen to get the stranger away so the girl I was can come back into the body of the woman I have become.

It is unnecessarily convoluted. Sharp things won’t work because no matter how much you cut yourself, you will bleed red and scars really aren’t worth it unless they are achieved in some heroic way. One song apiece is all. One song and one life and one everafter that stretches from one eternity to another while you (and I) sit in a corner sipping slurpees. It could happen. Or maybe not.

There is a cherry tree and a little cross marking the solemn death of a hamster. There are also twins downstairs who think each is the evil one in this equation that refuses to balance. A solution must be reached and we must not oversaturate the mixture because too much of you and too little of me is going to end up burning the world.

I burn paper hearts on the fifth of December.
You know it is trouble when pain feels like a friend and
you cannot remember a single night spent ob-li-vi-ous.

You were the smell of the forest on fresh spring mornings
The taste of hope on the roof of my mouth, an explosion of
colour behind my closed eyes, orange and tangy, you were.

Paper fed flames lick my fingers on the fifth of December
when I burn paper hearts at the beach in the evening
and loneliness becomes more than a word on my tongue
it is the wetness on my cheeks, the absence of warmth, the
space in my bed, it is.

Apples bloom in your cheeks. The day is young and flush with the arrogance that is intimately associated with beauty. It should be impossible to be sad on a day spilling over with sun.

This is where I learn to speak my secrets without saying anything at all. Inveigle my way into your dreams using just a hint of rosemary blue. Absolute nonsense, of course. Consider the crispiness of his “No.” Or the soft breathlessness of her “yes.” Capitulation and negation and a thimble full of sunshine. As I was saying, nonsense.

If I were a blueberry, I’d prefer to get eaten off the bush. Being put in a pie would hurt. Accommodate my strangeness and I will tell you a story about a bluebell and a buttercup. (More nonsense but surely you’ve come to expect it by now.)

What if I promise to make sense, except on Sundays. It’s impossible on Sundays. I will write you a love letter. Without any mention of flowers and love. Perhaps a bitter kind of love with lots of thorns for variety. No, that is a bit overdone. I do not believe in forbidden love. It takes too much energy and there never is cake at the end.

Yes, I am talking to myself. I always do. It’s fun. You should try it.

I’m hiding in my room. But the sun is shining outside and birds may be singing. Yet, here I am, hiding. Eyes drunk with sleep, hair wild with an edge of night, room a haven for the sinful. The chair stands at angle, it’s stance arrogant. Pretty soon I will be having an earnest conversation with it regarding comfort. What it doesn’t offer and what I seek. Then there’s the bookcase, in various stages of undress. Some books it offers proudly to the world (Murakami, Tolstoy, Garth Nix) and others it hides in shadows (the racier, the more erotic of these turned away from the light, blushing at their boldness). In front of the book case is the heater, turned off to coax Spring out of hiding. The computer is singing its own indecipherable song, its metallic edges gleaming warmly in the yellow light. The window sill has been gifted with the burden of books and a journal that can’t close due to the words fighting to get out in the world. And seashells. There’s an empty glass. It was full of some concoction my brother brewed. There’s the vanity table constructed with the blunt edges of wood, sharp nails protruding out of nowhere, maroon paint and a father who used to be able to builds worlds and more. On it is a mirror that is  carefully reflecting nothing it can be taken to court for and beside it are various miscellaneous items that do a lot to define me as a woman - a comb for one and several potions to keep me smelling pretty and looking young. Two boxes of books in front of the vanity table announce that this place is short term, temporary and the doors of the wardrobe are most assuredly closed. It is better not to know the chaos going on behind the placidity. The bed is full of pillows, blankets and me. The walls are empty but for one corkboard that I cling to stubbornly. The room needs character before it becomes mine, for a short time though it may be, and.

And?

Well, the sun is shining outside and through the blinds I can see yellow headed plants gaily waving in a breeze that looks deceptively warm. (It was hailing on Friday, I’ll have you know, sharp shards of ice gracing the pavement with bitter kisses).

A quiet despair, tenebrous and timorous, simmers. A room painted the colour of mustard seeds, disenchantment roils off the curtains ravaged by dust. Ashes in the grate remember the winter with longing. A ray of light, intrepid and fragmented, spills in through the crack in the dusty rose coloured curtains. He sits, cigar lit, cigar smoke puffing up his cheeks intermittently, his cheeks tell tales of the time that has passed, of the youth that he will not see again, of the pain he has carefully embroidered in the lines underneath his eyes and in the downward turn of his lips.

There is a coffee table that once must have gleamed, in the youth of its making, mahogany, burnished, oiled, beautiful. There is a doily on top of it. Yellowing. Papers covered with numbers rest on the surface of the coffee table. A stain - the culprit is the blue coffee cup that sits innocuously on top of a book with a red cover.

The man sits. He smokes.

A bee gains entrance into the room through the slightly open window. Its buzz is especially loud in that silence punctuated by breaths and rustles. It flies over to the vase that lies on a table set against the right wall of the room. It hovers over the dead, dried flowers, unwilling to give up but finally it yields to the impossibility and flies in circles, stuck fast in a trap of its own making.

So I recently translated this story from Korean to English for a 4th year Korean class. I learned Korean from scratch and I still trip over the fact that “moja” in Korean means hat while “moja” in Fiji-Hindi (my mother tongue) means socks. Anyway, I’m sharing this story because I think it is kinda brilliant even though my translation probably has lots of errors in it. The errors are mine and the brilliance is Lee Jong Im’s. (I really wish I knew his/her email address so I could send my translation to him/her (with apologies) but oh well.)

I thought I’d share this so many people got to read his/her work.

                                            —————————

The clothes that are overflowing the store grow like trees in a tropical rainforest.
Dad left and if I leave too, Mom and the clothes will endure the passing of time together.

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You can’t feel moonlight the way you feel the sun warming the top layer of your skin before heating the blood running in your veins until your heart is playing rock and roll and your neurons are running wild.

Nestled under the eaves of this gray morning was an epiphany. But it wasn’t meant for me.So I kept walking.

You keep on carving me out of the spots I build myself into. I’m like a piece without a fucking puzzle to belong to. Miss Universe spends her life avoiding mirrors. She fears that beauty is just skin deep and she’s running out of layers. Keep it young and keep it fresh.

Rain, smoke and the bitter end of a cigarette. I drip poetically all over your chair. Surrender, survival and submission, your existence exonerates mine. The walls whisper of grass stained summer days and I wonder if they are mocking me.

I blaspheme only in the mornings. Scandals look so much fresher in the morning light.

Today we’ll discuss elephants sipping tea from china teacups decorated with the most darling of English roses. A soiree of elephants. Elephants in saris. With bindi and ajhumka.Just the one.

I’ve been alive 28 years, some months and miscellaneous moments. I have been compounded into the person I am by the choices I have not made. Oh yes. Tonight at midnight I will sneak out of my room, pitter patter soft as danger cooling his heels outside his beloved’s room and then I will go stare at a sky that never has any stars. Where did the stars go? Did anyone else note their mass exodus?

I had these dreams, turgid dreams, swollen with hope and something else. This is me trying out my writing on again to see if it still fits after so many months of absolute silence. It does. I’m still this helter-skelter all over oblivious girl. Woman. I’m too old to refer to myself as a girl, aren’t I? Anyway. Ah yes, trying my writing on for size and it stills fits.

Now. I hate the shrill sound of the phone. I feel like it tethers me to this life. To responsibilities I no longer want. I feel like shutting myself up and I’m doing that. Summer is a bad time though. Summer makes me want to breathe.

A directive from the mind to the heart to the soul: Breathe, damn you. Maybe it was damn you or perhaps damn you. It doesn’t really matter. I wish I had the kind of life where I could spend wandering around, sitting in cafes writing, I wish I was that kind of person. I am not, by the way. People near me when I’m writing annoy me. I find their voices too loud, their fingernails too shiny and their lips too much. The clinking of the coffee cups bothers me just as much as the shuffling footsteps. The thud of the door as it swings open, the carefully modulated voice of the server as he asks you whether you would like whipped cream on that. Most annoying are the subtexts in each instance, in each group that comes rushing in to get the latest fix. Who is looking at who and is he looking back? The curly hair, wet, he just had a shower, the nape of his neck, the lemon scent of her soap becoming spicier on his skin - does his girlfriend know? No, she doesn’t. She’s oblivious, sipping her caramel macchiato - determinedly blind. The ostrich syndrome.

The plastic of the table, the fabric of the stuffed chair, how many bodies warmed it before mine? The colours - the sweetness of the coffee cake turns my tongue hedonistic and it wants to taste all of you - was that a good line? His smile, the crooked edge of it reminds of broken glass. I want to lick it. The barista has a wicked smile. What did she put in your coffee today? My sentences are clogged. The muse is nowhere to be found. I bet it was cyanide.

It was the glitter of the gold on the curve of the bone beneath her eyebrow that stopped him. He blinked and took a moment to orient himself. It was night - a shallow darkness - so almost morning. And from the thumping beats vibrating the building next to him, like drum beats heralding a pagan ritual, he was next to a club. The club. Gaudy neon signs would name it Berserk. Fitting name.

He was in the alley beside the club. He didn’t know why. The stench was proof of insidious affairs he usually didn’t have the stomach for. His feet were warm - he was wearing his favourite leather boots, a steal from the thrift store in the corner of Johnson and Johnson. The coarse wool of his sweater scratched - not his favourite shirt then. Why had he worn it? He looked down.

At the girl whose neck he had his hands wrapped around. There was a pulse beating madly in the hollow of her throat, like a bird trapped underneath her skin, wanting to escape. Her mascara was stained and her lips were peeled back to reveal nice teeth even though the scream she was in the middle of screaming contorted her face hideously. Her eyes were shot red. Afraid. He gave an experimental squeeze and the scream cut off midway, ending on a gasping wheeze.

Her hair was yellow. A fuck me yellow. A lie. He removed his hands from around her neck and sat back on his haunches, watching her with his silver eyes. She scrambled away from him, panic, panic, panic, flight. She ran, her mouth open spewing curses that would make a sailor blush. Then she was gone. He stood up and felt a rather odd regret.

It was the glitter of the gold that had brought him back into his head. He took out his packet of cigarettes. Grabbed one. Lit it. Inhaled. Then headed back to the club.

Love. Sex. and disaster on an ice cream cone.
experimental bliss on unicycles
and hurricanes topped with whipped cream.
amaranthine tomorrows
keep skipping beats
like my heart on repeat.
Fall. Get hurt. Get up.
Go back to start.

It was night. I sat beside you as quiet as the needles on the pine trees behind us.

Sometimes. When it rains. I sing. Sometimes I tie myself up in sentences and throw myself in a burst of black ink on pristine white paper
ruining it. Making it as I am.
Smudged, unformed.

You turned towards me. Your features were hidden. You took a breath. Held it for a minute then expelled it.

I’m sorry that breaking my heart hurt you.

I lit a fire for the flames. 

An ode to forever composed on onion skins.

All I have are pieces.

Sentimental as a cat, she was,
that haughty feline smile. The red dirt of the roads
eschewed her skirts. The sky swallowed her up
and spit her out. The sun refused to warm
her and the wind told his breezes to mind their
distances. It is a question of arithmetic. She was
subtracted from the rest of them. The remainder
after the divisor did its business with the divided.
Stone cold reality hardened the edges of her smiles
and the sea turned green under her eyes.
her legs spread wide and poetry denatured as
nature colluded to a synchronized damning of the
woman in red.