Before
My fingers have been growing out of my eyes, waving in the wind, dipping in the deepest blue, lurking with the leaves, to feel God’s hand trembling on mine, crimson blood blotched in his lips— shiny, sucking in all the golden light of the afternoon & yet & yet, these hands, in emptiness silently shriek not having a moor to hold on to in the cosmogenic of the night.
It’s been a long time since I have written anything. I have nothing interesting to write about. Love is ancient. Loneliness seems ubiquitous. Death is fiction, grief, too foreign. “Nothing is more difficult than surrendering to the instant. That difficulty is human pain” writes Clarice Lispector. What if I present you with pain from this surrender and while presenting it, the pain changing into a different form of pain, one that excludes the misery, anxiety, and sordidness like ice changing into vapor? After reading this, you would know something that eludes me. These aren’t merely a collection of words evoking a meaning, but rather a thought in motion, a day encapsulated in my head, that breathes on its own accord, like the rain sometimes in slow, limp motion while other times fastidiously beating the drums of this soiled cerebrum.
I wake up and thus I am born, reborn. Since to be born is to be known and then to be known to exist. Here is my existence in its form. The fan and its prehistoric sound have desecrated every ounce of moisture from the mucus membranes leaving it parched. An itch suddenly here, no no little down there, yes there. I wait for it to despair on its own. It doesn’t. So, I reach my shins to scratch (glad I have left nail biting), it brings a great satiation to give the body what it asks. My room is a heap of graveyards. Books are smeared like tissue paper on the oblong of my table where the phalanx of ants have nibbled and nibbled the leftover barfi from yesterday. I fling the spoiled barfi from the window. Some ants saunter on my limbs, I dust them off.
9:38
The chance of a person with HIV developing TB is 50-60%- this sound as a wave coming from my lecturer goes in through the acoustic meatus, vibrating the fluids in the cochlea, activating hair cells that send a secret morse code through ganglions to my cerebral cortex, where the sound turns in to meaning. 10-20 milliseconds altogether. Zzzzzz. A soft wind. Mushy sounds. I hear the murmurs of two people at the back: “garmi” “fan” “alchi”. All this makes me think of Herve Guibert, who in his book “To the Friend Who Didn’t Save My Life” writes about Michael Foucault as the character Muzil. In this autofiction, he writes about Muzil, without his knowledge, slowly disintegrating with the infection of the deadly virus. As much as it is about Muzil’s disintegration, you can also see his fate whittled down by the virus slowly eating away his T cells. “If life was nothing but the presentiment of death and the constant torture of wondering when the axe would fall, then AIDS, by setting an official limit to our life span—six years of seropositivity, plus two years with AZT in the best of cases, or a few months without it—made us men who were fully conscious of our lives, and freed us from our ignorance,” he writes. Guibert would have been 68 years old now. Foucault would have been 97. David would have been 69 years. Derek would have been 82. Yet all this seems outward to my reach as if I were James Baldwin listening to Bach.
I have never come across…….
Outside this old man has been mowing the field…. A bird suddenly. Focus. Focus, it’s a class.
11:00
As soon as I enter the pediatric ward, the smell of sickness wafting out of the bodies of children plunges me into another dimension. One that feels like a gateway to death or the realm of the living. Some are lying in bed like the leftover corpse of a dog hit by a fast-moving car, while some are active, blabbering, chattering, and jargoning. I am a student, and all I do here is ask the patient about their history.
External:
What is your name?
Silence
How old are you?
10
(It’s so hot here, should I turn on the fan, what if I get scolded by doctors, Ok leave it)
Where is your mother?
Eloped (the father says)
What happened to you? Why are you here?
Cough and abdominal pain for 5 days
Does it radiate?
No
Is there any other symptom?
…
Internal:
How is it for you? Are you alright? Where is your pain’s epicenter? The silence once settled looks like the scintillating body of water from above, but the darkness it births, settled in the hollow, clogs you from inside, flexes your body, and fills you up with its sweet venom until the body is a mausoleum. Like you, I had a silence that deepened into the darkness, and then into an ache, and into the funeral that holds this body like a skin.
So let the hands in, so they can gently scoop up the darkness out of your body.
A lot of medicine is just treating a body as a cumulation of signs and symptoms, a diseased body is just a way to revise what has been written in a book to a doctor, feeding medication, giving IV lines. So far, the body is seen as just an object that is sick to a health professional. What the patient feels/is feeling is outside the realm of the one who is treating. What we need is a femininomenon..zzzz… My back aches from standing… The housefly…
What we need.. is radical empathy, if only the doctor could feel a bit of what the patient is feeling, then the patient who comes in the pitch of night, the patient who is having excruciating pain would be treated with the same care, the same immediacy as the doctor treats their own children. If I am dying after a year or even five, don’t tell me that everything will be alright. What should I do with this?. I don’t need hope, hope is a father who has long gone to a foreign land. The end of the tunnel is just as dark as where I’m standing; tell me the exact time and I will live an entire year in a minute. I will write my novel with my bone, poetry with my blood, that long after I have gone there would be something buzzing, even if it is the most obscure, there would a hymn of me having born into the dawn of Kathmandu.
….I have never come across queer people who are old here, what interests me more is people who haven’t yet come forward with their queerness, and haven’t yet seen the face of it up close. This kind of mourning of people’s queerness. What is the word for it? Are there any queer people here among this surge of people? All I want is someone older, telling me how it was exploring queerness in this city. Does it get any better? How does one teach about queerness to people who can’t even spell the word, or moreover don’t know how to read the alphabet?
A portrait of green against yellow or 6 pm
the sun the green the sun
the sun the green
the sun
melting
into the sky the sun like ice
the green the green
gorging out goring like the green goring into
the night
Doom scrolling (8 pm)
Paralyzed by laziness, my body can’t seem to have the energy to pull a book close to my eyes. I open my Instagram. It is raining in Kathmandu, here the heat is unbridled. I look at the people crying in Gaza, nothing has changed after all. After minutes of watching memes and reels, I come across an interview of James Baldwin where the interviewer asks if he is still in despair about the world, to which he replies that he has never been in despair about the world but rather, enraged.
“I can’t afford despair. I can’t tell my nephew, my niece.. you can’t tell, you can’t tell the children there’s no hope”-James Baldwin
Sometimes I think my feeling of rage is dissipated into a sort of hopelessness, that no matter what terrible things will keep on happening in this world, there’s no cure to it, and then I go out and come to an empty page lying at my table and I see something shifting, I see the world shifting beneath my hands.
The absolute
The infidelity of words twines up, bangs into the ceiling of my darkness, with the force that could separate the salt from water, the darkness in the ceiling inching like a tiger. What is it? What is the antidote to this darkness?
Light?
I can’t afford light; all it does is flash and ember and leave a black tinge on my flesh. So, more darkness it is. Yes, even more, come all of you, swarm this body like the millions of bacterial colonies, inhabit here, play your dark violin, and soothe me out of this world. Darkness like the black hole, the black dot, I am consuming it all, the kernel, the nucleus. Now from this detonation, I can build myself atom to atom. This atomized body isn’t the victim of darkness but the new-fledged outcome of it. From here I can travel into the dark alleyways of the past, when the body was born, when the body was smashed, where the body was an object projected into the sky and fallen deep into the earth, and trace the present, through its markings.
Ache in the spine. heart-ache blood gushing
the body- a frenzy of epinephrine and norepinephrine
Can’t sleep, just can’t sleep, lids close and eyes wobble in the orbit like a fish which leads to this open yourself, let me see you let me really see you!!
you had once said and then I had disembodied myself, first my skin, then my fascia, then the soft shiny omentum, sluiced in the blood, I had yanked out my muscle and then my bones, told you this is all I am, and packaged myself through the electromagnetic waves which had reached to your screen
and then
Silence
More silence
What rendered you silent I had asked twice, putting my self-respect in my pocket.
You didn’t speak.
You had asked If I had read Foucault I had initially said no, but later recalling an article I said yes. Then one day, you mentioned you would want me to read Foucault to you, whose aesthetic, futuristic vision was so palpable I had dreamt you following my voice like a blind person. Everything is gone now. Everything! I have started to read Foucault on my own. Are you here? Are you reading this? You can go on —the husk is off, this is the sweet kernel of it, lolling in your mouth like the sun on the horizon. Now absolute tastelessness. The Sweet aftertaste—gone.
Forgot to take my medicine. Two pills which will help me sleep better. You too, should better go to your bed and sleep and wake up to the day longing for you or not, wherever you are.
