Grief: Physiology, Physicality

Two years, apparently, don't help.

Recalling a story in which my aunt was shocked to see my picture with my mother. “Since when you got so tall? Since when could your arms wrap your mother whole like that? You look like your father.” Thirty years, and I’m never not fascinated by different, creative ways my family calls me fat. Thirty years, and no one ever identified any similar physical features shared by my late father and me before. Maybe it has to take death so I could transform into him; maybe it takes death to resurrect him in me. The curl on my left side of my hair mirrors his right curl. Only now people see how my eyes assemble his and him, maybe that’s why my mother could no longer look me in the eye whenever my grief, in a form of anger, shows up. His rage requires her acquiescence.

My increased reclusion finds a home in his morning nap. My silence is filled with neurotic reenactments of our previous conversations. Keratoses start showing up on my neck, mirroring his keratoses on his nape. I want to tell him too many things he has missed; my jaw becomes tight: whether I speak or not, his tombstone creates a gridlock in my mouth. We planted aloe vera on his grave, because he used to make my hair mask and tend to my scalp with its gel. No Wijaya Kusuma has bloomed for the last two years, I’m too sleepy and tired to give them something to grow. Being awake in odd hours, I sleep at times when he finally was sure that I was safe and sound, usually around the third of the night – between 3 am to 6 am, everything belongs to Allah, he once said.

For every story and pain I deny coming out of my mouth, his silence finds a way. Sorry, I forgot to tell you that I still have to bankroll this fucking awful family, I apologize to our twenty turtles; I thought the image of his name grafted in gold ink on my daily planner was enough. It’s my hunched back, isn’t it? Or, the depth of my sigh. Or, an unknown vantage point I keep looking at on the train. It’s my lowered gaze, isn’t it? How tantalizing, the irksome pull between the difficulty in breathing and my faculty of disappearance.

Sometimes, the best insult comes from deliberate ignorance. His name, his death, the sequence of his death and his name on his death paperwork have all come up frequently, and they’re all nothing but a treatable disease. Waiting for a diagnosis, I sit down and forget to eat. Waiting for a phrenological analysis, I turn off the light and lie down. It is easier to tell people, “But it’s okay though,” rather than telling them that opening your guts and putting everything inside on a surgical table will help you. After all, they told me that I got my shit together, might as well just throw it away.

Snow no more, and no more grilled bananas for the new year. Hypothermia is bad, and so is diabetes. No, you cannot solve everything with cigarettes.